I'll tell you how. My company has been moving to solutions developed and/or hosted in EU for privacy reasons, but at the same time continue to go deeper and deeper into M$ ecosystem because the management believes XYZ product sounds cool and/or works better than the alternatives we're using. I'm just waiting for this circus to fall apart.

When we finally onboarded the D365 ERP replacement, management wanted to run perf testing on it told them we could do it in JMeter, and we already had JMeter code that we'd used for the older systems, and we'd learned more than enough from including it in integration automation, that I was sure we could do it.

Instead they hired two chodes from an agency and told them to use some odd tool. Literally a month into that project one of the contractors asked me straight up why we weren't just using JMeter.

They eventually cut those guys because they weren't able to produce, and then went with some kookball Akamai solution (Cloudtest?) They didn't even seem to realize that by going with that solution, they were going to be beholden to paying Akamai every time they wanted to run it. They somehow managed to cajole Akamai into giving us a standalone version of the tool, but they didn't seem to comprehend that when you run it that way you don't get the cloud.

It's funny, someone asked me the other day why I quit that job, and I'm now suddenly starting to remember why.

It was actually a pretty good company, it just wasn't a software company, so its tech decisions were often really bonkers. But that aside, it was actually a good company, and part of me kicks myself for leaving it -- I'd probably still be working there four years later.

I might have needed a lot of therapy in the meantime, though

I wish! It's more of a loose collection of random business softwares in various states of abandonment. D365 CE is a platform for Sales teams to organize and track leads, quotes, contracts, etc. D365 BC is an ERP platform born out of the ashes of NAV, the core of which Microsoft bought decades ago. D365 F&O, D365 S&M, and others are various flavors of AX, another ERP platform Microsoft bought over a decade ago. They are direct competitors to D365 BC for some reason. None of these softwares can communicate directly with each other, and none allow direct access to the Azure SQL. Occasionally Microsoft will throw a bone towards integration stuff like DualWrite or Synapse or Fabric, but they can never seem to commit and eventually abandon those too.

I would actually be much happier if it was just crummy databases instead of an archipelago of rotting digital islands.

Frankly it's a bit like HyperCard.

One of the things we learned early on in trying to integrate a D365 system into our UI integration test automation, was that when you changed pages, the previous page was actually still in the DOM and so if you didn't update your locators to the new "context" or screen, you'd be trying to interact with things from two screens ago. I dunno honestly what they would have done without someone like me who could actually RE that. The guy that had seniority over me was completely lost.

Salesmen

Because Microsoft knows if it can sell the product to your manager, that's all that really matters