My workplace doesn't have much in terms of workloads running in Azure, but even just interacting mostly with Entra, Exchange Online, SSO, and some automated account provisioning: It is insane just how many rules and practices have built up around the unreliabilty and non-reproducable but still frequently occurring issues.

Boss warned me that licensing can take up to 48 hours to take effect in his experience. But I'd been living in it for a week and changes were effectively immediate. Until they just weren't.

One of our processes regular took an hour for Azure to complete its part. It was this way for years. Suddenly it started sporadically taking up to four hours with no discernable pattern, so now we set the following steps to run four hours later.

Audit logs that don't actually show you what you're looking for, and instead show impossible situations like an automated Microsoft process granting a user their Office license a full month after they'd already had it. But the logs don't show the initial license assignment, even though they've been using that functionality this whole time and the license has shown as applied to them the whole time.

And more cases of completely missing basic fucking functionality than I could ever fucking recall.

Why the fuck can't I discern between a user who has a license assigned directly and through a group, and a user who just has the license through the group only? Through the API it is impossible. In the web UI, it indicates the multiple sources of the license correctly. But only most of the time. Sometimes it displays the info wrong.

Arg. Sorry for the rant. Azure has been a pain in my ass since I first started studying certs for it.