Pretty happy Azure & DevOps fan here. Been using it since day-1. I've helped build large platforms at several companies completely on Azure with great success. They were all small teams that shared all responsibilities across FrontEnd/BackEnd/DB/DevOps.
Our current project uses what I feel like are pretty standard features for a SaaS app. They include C#/.NET Core, Linux App Services, SQL Server, FrontDoor, SignalR, Functions, etc. Functions is the only feature that has been bumpy for us deployment-wise.
The journey of the various portals has been fun. The current one isn't perfect but it's far better than my experience using AWS. It's got to be a challenge to organize such a massive portal developed by so many teams.
The effort MS has put into documentation has been really great as well.
That said, there's a lot that could be better. A lot of the PMs are on Twitter I tend to be a squeaky wheel there about various problems so hopefully they're listening.
I have had the same experience - the entire package works really well for a small team. We had a really easy time configuring our builds, but we don't do anything fancy - install things, run unit tests, create a build artifact.
Haven't had issues with Azure functions, though DI is wonky in them if you try to build anything complex (imo you shouldn't). Other than that, I guess I just don't use them often to really understand what all the boilerplate does. Finally, when we switched to Python from .NET, it didn't feel like any of the function knowledge carried over somehow. Felt like developing on a different platfom.
I also HATED the Azure certification exam compared to GCP. GCP tried to actually teach you something practical, Azure tested a bunch of memorization that you can google.
There’s a nice bug with azure functions where it reports the environment it’s running in as “development” when it should be “production”, which means the app uses the wrong settings.
Nothing in the documentation to mention this, you just need to deploy and learn from your mistakes!
Fortunately the impact to us was quite small, but it's definitely left a sour taste in my mouth as far as azure functions go.
The whole story regarding organizing the code, breaking changes between versions, confusing plans, different styles of configuration between that and aspnet web apis, trying to configure individual functions in the same app without affecting others, etc. is not good!
One thing I do find is that although their documentation is now open-source, it can still take a long time to get changes reviewed and merged (if at all). I waited about 3 months once for a simple change to documentation that was clearly wrong and by the time they looked at it, the docs had been re-factored.
They need to learn to embrace the Amazon Turk and have the right people review documentation edits. Should be able to quickly check a proposed change and then just merge it.
Our current project uses what I feel like are pretty standard features for a SaaS app. They include C#/.NET Core, Linux App Services, SQL Server, FrontDoor, SignalR, Functions, etc. Functions is the only feature that has been bumpy for us deployment-wise.
The journey of the various portals has been fun. The current one isn't perfect but it's far better than my experience using AWS. It's got to be a challenge to organize such a massive portal developed by so many teams.
The effort MS has put into documentation has been really great as well.
That said, there's a lot that could be better. A lot of the PMs are on Twitter I tend to be a squeaky wheel there about various problems so hopefully they're listening.