> they basically insist that I become an unpaid systems engineering QC person
Microsoft support is guilty of this, especially for Azure & 365 issues.
Like sorry, but you aren't paying me to debug your software. Here's a report, and here's proof of me reproducing the problem & some logs. That's all I'm going to provide. It's your software, you debug it.
And based on my own personal experience, even if you persevere and force them to acknowledge the problematic behaviour, they can turn around and say it's not a problem and working as intended.
For example, when using Azure Front Door, it's apparently absolutely not a problem that as yet un-cached file in their CDN downloads from their own Azure Blob storage have a maximum download speed of around 2MB (16Mb) per second:
Them:
> Hello Jonathan,
> I hope you are doing well!
> I sincerely apologize for the significant delay in our response, which was necessary to conduct further internal testing.
> After a comprehensive review, we have determined that the behavior you are experiencing is typical for this type of operation.
> This is primarily due to the connection not being entirely directly, as it must pass through Azure Front Door. This process also involves distributing the cache among point-of-presence (POP) servers, which inevitably impacts the > operation's speed. Let me provide you with documentation covering that matter:
Me:
> So to be clear, Azure Front Door maxes out at less than 2MB/s (16Mbit/s) for uncached items even when everything is on Microsoft’s own servers?
Them:
> Hello Jonathan,
> Thank you for getting back to me.
> These values may vary by region, but those particular ones apply for South Africa North.
I also tested this behaviour in US and EU regions (from an Azure VM requesting a file from Azure Blob storage in the same region as the VM but via Azure Front Door) and in EU it was also similarly limited while in the US it was only a tiny bit better.
We use Cloudflare now, cheaper, faster, configuration UI which isn't painfully slow. Not without their own recent incidents, but better than Azure Front Door 99.99% of the time.
While I'd love to take your tack, unfortunately, I find that if I actually want the fix, I have to become their unpaid engineer.
Which is ridiculous, because at the same time my company is paying a separate support fee, large enough to literally employ a dedicated engineer for my company!
I will do the work for them (typically paid for by my employer) iff I can expect them to fix it.
Blackbox debugging is a PITA, which is part of why I prefer open source, but it is what it is... If something is broken, and I can get it fixed by putting in the time to get a good report, and etc and they fix the thing, then I'll do it.
But if they don't fix the stuff, I have no shortage of things to fix myself.
Damn. I've put quite a lot of effort into open source tools w.r.t. debugging and bugfixing, but yeah putting that for a corporate product that doesn't even respect you must be draining.
I filed an issue, they told me to get in GitHub, fix it and file a PR myself O_o. In fairness they bugged me and cajoled me and offered to help until I actually did it, which I actually appreciated in the end because the experience was useful. (Give a man a fish, etc...)
Microsoft support is guilty of this, especially for Azure & 365 issues.
Like sorry, but you aren't paying me to debug your software. Here's a report, and here's proof of me reproducing the problem & some logs. That's all I'm going to provide. It's your software, you debug it.