Linode is also owned by Akamai...

Google and especially Amazon/AWS compete with a lot of large companies which drive them towards Oracle, IBM and Microsoft as escape hatches.

For instance, Walmart doesn't want to pay their largest competitor.

Can almost guarantee there were 173 agents because there were 173 silo'd teams with competing goals and priorities working on their own codebases in isolation.

And no, a 174th team doesn't solve it. Communication and collaboration across teams is key

>There was high turnover

This is a huge knowledge drain. You're constantly spending time getting new engineers up to speed and it takes years to relearn all the nuances the last person knew.

You're in a constant cycle of re-learning the hard way instead of proactively applying experience.

Their VMs and load balancers mostly work. Their managed services are a crapshoot. We routinely "self hosted" at the company that used Azure to ensure some semblance of stability.

For instance, our Patroni clusters were much more performant and stable than Azure Single Server Postgres (what a terrible product...).

Maybe this is why they retired Single Server PostgreSQL and are now offering only the new Azure Database for PostgreSQL (flexible server). Zero problem with the latter for us so far.

I've also noticed AWS tends to have less "magic" global services and tends to favor cell architecture with partitions and isolation.

These super duper magic global services seem to be the cause of most outages since the blast radius is so huge.

On the other hand, the proposition of a magic, infinitely scaleable service endpoint is nice from a developer perspective.

Even on AWS, if you go for the managed magic version of the thing, they'll make you pay more, lose some flexibilitym and the relinquished control will change things in a way that benefits AWS (slower scaling, limitations, unnecessary overprovisioning, overhead).

An example - if you scale things manually by provisioning and starting EC2 instances via API - it will be more performant and cheaper than either Lambda or ECS Fargate (or Batch...). But those things at least work reliably.

With the other two cloud providers, you'll likely run into a bug you cannot fix yourself, and you will have no support to help you.

The one place I worked that used it - got a bunch of free credits for signing up - had some license agreement for some Microsoft service (Teams Oath App or something similar) where a certain percentage of the infra had to be hosted on Azure

Don't remember the details of #2, just that they were a "Microsoft partner" of some sort which was beneficial to integrating with the Microsoft apps the product depended on and appearing as an app in the marketplace. The company built software that ingested IM/chat data from corporations (Teams and I think something older)

Yeah, mini PCs are quite a bit more expensive. An N100 with 16GB could be had for $135 or sometimes less on sale but is now about $250

In the U.S., some of it was tariffs, though.

You are people. You are also in the minority.

Didn't they eliminate the highest tier Mac Pro and raise the price of the one under it?