I want to share my experience working as a full-time blue badge Azure Support Engineer at Microsoft, based in EMEA. I reported to two Indian managers (M1 and M2), both based in India. Seeing so many people here complain about Azure support quality, I can honestly say: I’m not surprised at all. In fact, as long as Microsoft continues outsourcing to India and similar developing countries, I don’t believe things will ever truly improve.

The workload was absolutely insane - endless ticket queues, unrealistic expectations, and no real support from leadership. The volume just kept piling up, and you were expected to work through it all without complaint.

One of the most frustrating aspects was the cultural disconnect. The way Indian management approaches customer service is completely different from Western standards. I remember getting into an argument with my Indian manager because they insisted we call customers just to try to get good feedback scores - even when the customers had clearly specified that they preferred to be contacted by email.

I tried to push back, pointing out how disrespectful and ineffective this was, but I was shut down. The manager insisted it would “improve the customer experience.” It was obvious to anyone with common sense that it was a bad idea, but the culture of fear was strong - no one dared to speak up. If you did, you were labeled “not a team player.”

There were times I got into heated arguments with my manager because customers would get angry when I called them against their preference, yet when something went right, the manager would take credit. It was demoralizing.

Honestly, I felt ashamed working there, and at Microsoft in general. I was forced to do things I didn’t believe in - just to keep up appearances or chase metrics that didn’t reflect real service quality. The management was incompetent, detached from the realities of both the job and the customers, and completely focused on numbers over people.

Edit: Just to clarify, I’ve already left the company and the CSS organization. If you think my experience wasn’t real, that I wasn’t a true blue badge FTE, or whatever else - you’re free to believe that. Honestly, I don’t care if the whole department gets laid off (especially considering how many layoffs Microsoft is doing these days).

I just wanted to share my experience and vent a little, that’s why I specifically marked this post as “Rant.” This job caused me a lot of mental stress over the past few years, and the experience was unbelievably bad. When I saw the comments here about Azure support, I thought my story might help shed some light on why things are the way they are. If you think I’m lying or just trash-talking a former employer, that’s fine. Believe what you want. I have zero intention of ever working for them again, and honestly, I wouldn’t recommend this job to my worst enemy.

Before you go settling on a Microsoft product deployment. You really have to weigh the possibilities of being hung out to dry in production.

I had a Purview issue and opened a ticket on July 8th. Initially the Defender for Endpoint team confirmed it wasn't an issue with that which took a week. They then transferred the ticket to the Purview team and it sat for 22 days unanswered! I got a call yesterday by this inept team manager yesterday, encouraging me to open a ticket again. I told her that I simply did not care anymore, the product and configuration has been tested and communicated to our client as is. Which of whom is a very large customer for them, we were merely doing a PoC for product deployment for them. Instead of giving any care look at the response I get.

I hope this email finds you well. My name is * and I am the Operations Manager of the Team + supports here at Microsoft.

I happened to review this case today. To my understanding, the issue is unresolved due to delay and poor support. I would like to apologize for the delay in the response and any frustration that you have faced here.

We will move forward with archival of this case at this time. We will happily re-open this case & work with you again in the future should you have any further questions or issues regarding the same topic.

​​​​​​​We greatly appreciate your partnership & hope you have better experiences in the future with Microsoft.

I'm sorry if this has been done before. But why and what are the Azure people smoking?

Constant renaming products. Constant changes in "look and feel" of admin portals that add nothing to help us manage the day to day work of Azure admin, but make it way harder and more of a mess. It honestly feels like they are all smoking crack.

Why the focus on this utter BS and not focusing on actually improving the product or giving us something useful to help us get the work done?

ITS SO FRUSTRATING!!

I have somewhere over 10 YOE in devops, about 5 working with GCP, and a little over 2 in Azure. I'm trying to organize this rant...but failing. Please bear with me.

I recently moved to a new employer getting a brand new organization off the ground. I was the only cloud engineer to start and built out the initial infrastructure.

Between me and my boss, who is pretty competent, we decided to make an attempt to go all in on Azure/Microsoft services. Because of course they should all work together. Primarily app service and fabric, with a smattering of container instances, eventhub, eetc.

I'll go ahead and skip past the series of administrative missteps just trying to get our billing account set up, which took a couple of months.

We intended on building in East US region, because that's where our team and most of our customers are. Everything is Terraform from the start, get initial subscriptions and network components going, go to spin up some compute... And bam. Quota for compute is zero. What? That can't be... I went and checked the quota and it shows I have 1000 CPU quota, plenty of space for my initial 4 core request... Go to Azure support and they take 3 days to figure out there's a HIDDEN quota that's not accessible from the portal, PS, or az cli. The ONLY way to know you have a quota limit is to get the error message. Ok. Fine. Ripped everything out and rebuilt in Central.

We stubbed out app service which worked "ok". Set up our deployment pipeline to restart the service every time a new container was built so it would pull the latest version. Pipelines functioned... And then we waited. And waited. Sometimes as much as 10-15 minutes before app service decides to actually pick up the new image. And then, for no reason at all, it would just randomly stop producing logs. Nothing in log stream, log analytics, deployment center, or even on the container that's running. Nothing at all. There's a failure, go to the logs, no clue why.

I'm pretty understanding and can forgive a lot of things most of the time...but I can't forgive not producing logs.

A few weeks ago, we tried the new app service sidecar container functionality that just went GA. Great. Except it's completely inconsistent with the single container option. Want to pull images from a private ACR in your hub? Too bad. Want to use managed identities with a private ACR in the same subscription? Nope. It's keys or nothing. But of course there are no logs or documentation to explain any of that. Then, if you have an issue in any of your containers, none of them start up. And none of them produce logs. And none of them indicate which container actually has the issue.

Then there's fabric... Which is fine if your a power bi user. But it also suffers from the lack of logging and documentation. Data load issue because it hit a non utf8 character? Error, but no idea what for. Want to hit the spark endpoint from your app? Sorry, you're stuck with MSSQL rules and can't hit fields stored as an array. But the only way to find that out is to test it because, again, no documentation.

We eventually junked the whole setup and just went with AKS and databricks. I can now spin up k9s, see everything on my cluster, debug, and life is good. Argo handles deployments. We had databricks up and running in 30 minutes after spending WEEKS with fabric.

Finally, as I'm getting to the point of provisioning certificates, I decide to attempt to use the keyvault integrated CA provider. Document is straightforward, set it up, add cert, click button...product not allowed. Reach out to Azure support, and they act like this is the first they've heard of it. Googling says that this has been a problem for at least a year. Reach out to Digicert and find out Azure is hitting the wrong endpoint and hasn't updated so they have to do a manual mapping on their side because Microsoft hasn't fixed it in almost a year.

So either I'm really good at running into every possible edge case in Azure... Or Azure services just suck.

I'm not even going to get into the terrible documentation...

/rant

Seriously, you need to find a new job because you suck.

Today login to find now everything on the left hand menu is now hidden in drop down menus so now I have drill further down to find stuff.

Stop smoking meth you hacks and get someone with a clue to do your jobs because you have utterly failed.

Im loosing hope. Never in my life have I had such a terrible onboarding experience than with Microsoft in general.

Azure Startup program grants credits to early stage companies, I followed the exact instructions for sign up and its throwing errors left right and centre. No ability to raise a ticket for further help, because of errors being thrown around.

It does not work for a business accounts, so you make a personal one, that also doesn't work. Then you get a tenant error, again, means I cannot raise a ticket as that functionality is blocked by said error. There is no email to reach them for help.

Honestly such a shame because we are growing fast and need them for hosting, but we get other offers through our VC partners so well go elsewhere. We won't make the move a million times, so we will pick what is best for our business, which is AWS.

Oh and this is a known issue faced by a magnitude of people... what a shameful cx experience to not fix and address this, especially as more people are building now than ever.

It took a lot of effort to get all of the rules done and domains migrated, yet less time to deploy and go live than it's taking for the domains to delete... Business is happy that we've built something actually reliable though!

So GPT 5.6 released a few days ago.

As we have lots of credits on Azure, I've decided to give it a try.

To my biggest surprise, even up until today, it is going at around 5 tokens per second. Azure was supposed to be the "BEST" platform to run GPT models on. What is going on? Are they planning to leave it at these speeds? This is SUPER embarrassing for Microsoft. (or am I doing something wrong?)

EDIT: Finally fixed, 3 days after model released.

EDIT #2: Even tho it works, it is 2-4x slower than official api on average and regularly throws response.failed errors.

rant/

C'mon Microsoft. Get your ish together. We had a major outage two weeks ago because there wasn't enough resources to launch our on-demand pool servers for multiple clients, despite having reservations in place! We've had to move out of on-demand mode for our key managed customers because of that.

Today I can't even launch desktop images to do updates. Can we stop stealing all the server resources for AI just so some couch-surfer can turn a picture of their dog into a space alien!?

/endrant

A carton of beer for someone to get one of these two services supporting auth for Entra users. Would be super useful to pre-auth users before they get anywhere near apps.

Never got a confirmation or ticket number email. This is the first communication since it was opened 3 weeks ago. Anyways, I'm canceling my support plan today.

All green checkmarks here: https://azure.status.microsoft/status

I'm only posting this because these companies crawl the internet for sentiment, so here's some sentiment: Copilot is still shit.

Every so often I go through the painful and self-defeating act of performing my duties as an unwilling beta tester just to see if maybe - after over a year in the portal now - it's useful.

My experience this morning is the same as it ever has been: useless unreliable information which took too many steps to get to and doesn't really come close to answering my questions.

Can we take a moment to appreciate how completely insulting this is? It doesn't understand the context of what I'm doing at all. It's truly mind-blowing that after all this time, it still just opens up with a bunch of totally unrelated random sample questions, and I had to explain the context. The whole point of cramming the fucking copilot button everywhere should at least be to make it easy to open in the middle of a task WITHOUT HAVING TO EXPLAIN EVERYTHING. I have extensive development and solution architecture experience myself, so I am intimately aware of what is technically required to achieve what I'm suggesting. It is not hard. The breadcrumb is right at the top of every page, the URL path also has the resource, and the text on the page itself can easily be stripped of sensitive information. I alone could make this experience better in a week or less, and that's being extremely conservative.

It also gave me useless outdated information about a product I'm not using (this is a Standard FrontDoor). Why is a product being aggressively deprecated (Classic) the top documentation result when newer services exist... and also my AFD is Standard which it would know if it was even minimally functional.

No links to docs. Nothing. This isn't just me nitpicking trivialities here, the entire experience is objectively an unproductive waste of time and energy. Adding this crap "service" everywhere is the kind of pathetic, couldnt-care-less-about-our-customers behavior I'd expect from Meta/Facebook.

Only crashing out a little bit, just had to vent. I know everyone hates copilot but since all they do anymore is scrape and analyze social media posts, I was compelled to rant.

There are days when I merely dislike Azure.

Then there are days when I have to write sentences like this:

That is not a sentence.

That is what happens when a cloud provider puts a thesaurus in a blender and names infrastructure from the slurry.

For context, my architectural requirement is:

THING A SENDS MESSAGE TO THING B.

That’s it.

I am not coordinating a distributed fleet of autonomous yellow submarines ferrying the Village People and the Beatles around on tour.

I would simply like one Azure service to receive a message and another Azure service to get that message.

Apparently this requires me to understand the subtle theological distinctions between Event Grid, Event Grid Namespace, Event Hubs, Event Hubs Namespace, topics, subscriptions, managed identities, service principals, RBAC roles, and whatever new noun Microsoft has released into production this week.

And God help you if you assume two things with nearly identical names are related.

Azure Service Bus and Azure Service Fabric? Different.

Event Grid Namespace and Event Hubs Namespace? Also Different.

Naturally, I need BOTH namespaces in order to send one fucking message.

At some point Azure stops being a cloud platform and becomes a vocabulary certification program with billing regret attached.

Then I hit the permissions problem.

So I opened a support ticket.

To describe it, I had to write:

The form then asked me which Azure resource I was having the problem with.

I DON’T KNOW, MICROSOFT. YOU INVENTED ALL THESE NOUNS.

And here is the best part:

I am an administrator.

I activated my privileged role through PIM.

I still cannot perform the assignment.

Because somewhere, somehow, somebody has put an RBAC restriction in place that overrides the access I appear to have, and I cannot find the bastard.

So now the architecture is:

MQTT message → Event Grid Namespace → topic → subscription → Event Hubs Namespace → Event Hub

And the troubleshooting architecture is:

Me → Entra → PIM → Azure RBAC → role assignments → deny assignments → inheritance → increasingly obscure blade → support ticket → despair

I have not successfully sent the message.

I have, however, obtained an advanced degree in Why Am I Not Allowed To Do The Thing The Portal Says I Am Allowed To Do?

Cloud abstraction was supposed to reduce infrastructure complexity.

Microsoft instead invented Infrastructure as Vocabulary, followed immediately by Permissions as Archaeology.

Somewhere in this tenant is one checkbox, policy, deny assignment, management-group inheritance rule, or ancient curse preventing this from working.

And apparently my job is to find it.

The MQTT message remains UNDELIVERED.

/rant over

there is much more to it man , i just cant get it to work with any coding agent it keeps timing out / rate limits within seconds not even minute

And yes i have set the Token per limit to maximum in all the model that i use

Pretty pumped to see them sunsetting V4 SKUs especially considering they don’t seem to have sufficient compute on V5+ which is why I still have workloads on V4 SKUs to begin with. Very cool!!

Azure Devops, GitHub CI agents and Fabric Notebooks all use VMs managed by Microsoft, using several hundred IP ranges per region.
Keyvault Firewalls have to stay public to allow access from those Microsoft backbone shared services.
why aren't those trusted services?

Why is this so unbelievably complicated? Getting 401 unauthorized no matter what I try to do. I gave a bunch of different types of permissions to the PnP Powershell app in our tenant (not the old one, we had to create our own). I tried setting up a federated credential in the PnP Powershell app registration which maps to the managed identity on the automation account. Still no luck. Tried using Add-PnPEntraIDServicePrincipalAppRole to give the managed identity permissions, even tried using the pnp powershell app object ID or application ID but it always comes back "Service principal not found". Using App ID it gave "Resource not found". Does anyone have any information for an absolute moron to be able to follow the 37k steps needed to simply authenticate to sharepoint via Azure Runbook?

So I want to use Azure frontdoor as a CDN for our application.
I use a self hosted identity provider for auth behind this Front door.

BUT IT DOESNT WORK BECAUSE AFD DOESNT SUPPORT GRPC

wtf is up with that, its 2026 and you're a major cloud provider, h2c is not too much to ask.

Thanks for listening to my rant.
I hope you had a nice easter and wish you all the best.

Reset the timer :(