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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

<rant class="disgruntled"> I've used Azure's cloud hosting in production for a half dozen sites and I have to say it's driving me nuts.

We tried to flip DNS to Azure and it wouldn't resolve. It took our senior developer two days of talking to Azure support to solve. Ended up being their fault.

Today I ported some work using PHP's mail() function, which evidently Azure doesn't support?

This is probably our own fault for switching environments but we've moved sites from Media Temple and GoDaddy to Azure and consistently had problems.

Needless to say, a price drop isn't making me any more excited about Azure. Their UI is convoluted (though beautiful, for sure) and I've had nothing but issues with it. </rant>

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If you (or anyone in the this thread) would be so kind as to write up a description of some specific functionality or interactions that we can improve and email them to me (m/a/r/a/y at microsoft dotcom) I would appreciate it. I can't promise instant gratification results, but I will do my best to get your feedback to the right person.

Thanks :-)

I can give some point here: (A cluster below is hadoop cluster)

- Machines reboot without any notifications. - Blob storage gets throttled ( i was told by a support staff) and at times become unreachable. - Some clusters i create, go into "Operational Mode" in that beautiful UI. and there is no way to delete that cluster! - At one instance, a cluster failed because, i was told, some internal azure tables got deleted! - Start up time (for PasS) for a cluster is 13+ mins regardless of how many machines you have in it.

I've had some issues with Azure too and have fought it a bit. My app is Node/Postgres based. I'm pretty positive if I had developed a C#/SQL Server app, then Azure would be almost entirely smooth sailing. I can't really blame MS for targeting their own tech first. Node, PHP and the like are not quite as first class citizens in Azure yet.

I never had trouble with any .net stack stuff but when i tried node I had some issues. Ultimately I used the MS tooling to provision the site the first (webmatrix) and from then on everything was fine.

Ah, well, PHP's mail function is kind of terrible. https://phpbestpractices.org/ (look for the section on why)

Most other cloud hosting platforms don't support mail() either. You're supposed to sign up for something like Sendgrid or Amazon SES and use that.

I'm guessing that they try to manage how email is sent from their infrastructure in an attempt to curb spam and prevent their IP ranges from being blacklisted and blocked.

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