Hey Bekir, I recently came across your blog. I work on the Azure Compute engineering team and want to clarify a few things. It looks like you started exploring Azure using the classic stack. I would encourage you to explore the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) stack which is a rewrite of the Azure management platform released 2 years ago due to some of the challenges you faced. Here's a good overview of the new stack https://docs.microsoft.com/...

For example one of the issues you mentioned that caused allocation challenges on a cluster i.e. affinity groups doesn't exist anymore.

In ARM stack, you do not need to understand Cloud Services & Deployments. We recently released a capability called Managed Disks, which means storage side of things is handled for you. Here's an intro doc https://docs.microsoft.com/...

For automating your enviornment, look into Azure Resource Manager Templates which let your specify your infrastructure as code. Here's an example template that let's you quickly create a Linux VM. https://github.com/Azure/az...

Re: Old and New Portal, new Portal should be the only place you need to go once you are on the ARM stack.

Re: CLI tooling - The python CLI recently went GA. The team has also published some get started examples https://azure.microsoft.com...

Hopefully that solves few challenges for you! :)

I also got some similar comments in reddit ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AZ... ), thanks for the comments.

I found this blog entry by accident. I also was very frustrated with Azure. In my position there was no way around using it. So I'm making the best of it. I don't know if you gave up on azure entirely, but if you are still trying, check out azurectl (https://github.com/SUSE/azu.... My team has been working on this project in order to solve the tooling issue. This has really helped make azure usable for me.

Hey, thanks for the pointer, I don't think I'll use Azure soon but I'l keep this in mind.