By Thomas Claburn
Publication Date: 2026-04-04 10:00:00
In 2024, federal cybersecurity evaluators reportedly dismissed Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCC High) as garbage, although they used a more colorful term. To understand why, it helps to consider the history of the underlying Azure infrastructure.
Axel Rietschin, who worked as an engineer on Azure Core Compute for a year and as a Windows Base Kernel engineer for eight years before that, has now written a less dismissive but more damning history of his experience with the Microsoft cloud service.
In a series of six essays (so far), he recounts how Microsoft rushed Azure to market in 2008 to compete with Amazon Web Services and squandered opportunities for stability while failing to support staff.
“Azure never operated as smoothly or independently as promised,” Rietschin wrote. “What Microsoft presented to the world, and to its most demanding customers, was a sophisticated system perpetually on…
