Our problems with VMs on Azure were:
We take a cloud agnostic approach to systems development so we have flexibility. Our team is quite small and we use Manageengine for patching servers and Atera for patching users systems. We only use a few cloud native services like AWS event bridge, load balancers, S3, Lambda, Azure DNS, Azure storage, Azure App service. But if needed we could pull any one of those and move to an open source solution without too much fuss. The red tape comes from exec level and their appetite for risk. For some reason they think cloud is more stable than our own servers. But we had to move VMs off Azure because of instability!
Yeah we were hit hard by the cost projections. It really sucks. But HCI stack from MS remains even more expensive. We have decided to bring as much as we can in house and only put the workloads that have strict contractual uptime agreements on our VMware or HCI stack. The rest of the stuff goes on KVM or bare metal to save costs.
Same, we use AWS, Azure and a third party VMware suite cloud. The VMware is superior by far IMO because I like to have full control of my systems and roll my own stuff. I think the big clouds make their money by saving time on dev ops. I come from a sys engineering background and transitioned to development so none of that stuff is very difficult. I’ve tried Linode, Hetzner, Digital ocean and a few more but I think VMware does all I need.
Just use an incognito tab. You will get cookies for your browsing session and then when you close the tab, poof they are all gone
I don’t hold it against them. They have their hands full at the moment with DDOS attacks. The admins are barely able to keep the place running. The beauty of federation is that we can pick and choose where to sail from.
Unfortunately the machines that get infected are not fully controlled by us but they get networking and internet from us (space rental in the building), so we isolate them as much as possible and we black hole all the bad traffic on the router level.
Our machines all have EDR and strict security policies. Not much gets past that.
We are seeing on our corporate network lots of browser hikackers that connect to c&c and are used in botnet DDOS as a service. Once you install x software it sets up a persistent service that keeps modding chrome.exe etc
Firewalling the .exe that you installed does nothing to stop the calls to c&c
Kubernetes is extremely expensive on cloud so we run our own in house