Microsoft Azure is a kafkaesque mess for the most basic of tasks

I signed up for Azure and I just wanted to outline how absolute shit it is for something as basic as setting up a new virtual machine.

It says my subscription doesn’t support VM creation in East US, choose a different location. Okay, what about West US 2?

Cool, it lets me make some very high end VMs that I don’t need yet. I just want a shit kicker VM to test out how the other bits of Azure (like adding block storage, etc) work, but they’re all unavailable to me.

Screen Shot 2022-05-27 at 08.26.08

Hmm, maybe it’s because I’m not a paying customer? But I upgraded my account to a Pay As You Go/Azure Plan:

All the cheap ones have this error - “size not available for this subscription”. I’m on the free tier thingy so that makes a little sense, but shouldn’t it be the high end units I can’t access? Not the 1 core 2GB RAM VMs? I click the troubleshooting link to get more info:

I can ask for more access, cool. I shouldn’t have to do this, but sounds easy enough.

Alright! I don’t need a support ticket to get more quota, just select Manage Quota to increase it instantly.

Oh, “One or more resource providers selected are not registered for this subscription. To access your quotas, register the resource provider”. Okay then, I will click that link. To “register the resource provider”, whatever the fuck that is.

It’s more documentation!

The doco doesn’t explain exactly what I need to do, just how to in general manage a resource provider. I click around and find the “Microsoft.Quota” resource provider, which I think is the right one to manage quotas. I also find one called “Microsoft.Subscription” that I enable anyways, because it feels like something that should be enabled based on the “One or more resource providers selected are not registered for this subscription” error message from earlier.

I refresh the subscription quota page and nothing. Same error as before.

I look at more of the resource providers and find one called Microsoft.Compute. I want to compute so I register that one and try again.

There we go, some more options appear. Lots of options appear actually - over 4500 of them and there’s no option to “select all”. You have to enable them region by region, VM family by VM family. What the fuck? I just want stuff in West US 3, as it’s the closest location the juicy HBv3-series machines (AMD EPYC 7003 boxes!) I want to experiment with live.

But look, the basic VMs are not available, many options are greyed out and have this message:

Okay, but, umm, there’s nothing to actually do here. This area is just to increase my quota. So if I want more than 10x “Standard Family vCPUs” I can do that here, but I don’t want more than 10 CPUs. I just want one CPU! I can see the item “Virtual Machines” greyed out.

Does that mean I don’t have access to virtual machines at all in West US 3? I can’t tick the box, but there is a little blue icon at the end to “create a support request”.

Fuckkkkkkk we are back at the support page earlier and if you click Manage Quota, it takes you back to this screen where I just was:

I Googled the “NotAvailableForSubscription” and the first result is someone from 2020 with the exact same complaint.

Basically, Microsoft has gimped non-paying subscriptions from making pretty much any VMs in all regions. Would be nice if this was mentioned on the damn Virtual Machine creation area, or even at signup for a trial account.