Boy oh boy, did Azure piss me off this time. I’ll start by saying I tend to enjoy working in Azure over the other major cloud providers out there. But it’s fair to say, Azure has PLENTY of quirks. A while back, I was working with a client on a consulting gig I’m doing on the side where we were setting up my access & permissions to the Dev and Productions resources + subscriptions. Access to Dev is granted, I’m made contributor on the subscription, so I have access to all the resources and bits and bobs that I need.
The same exact thing is set for production, however nothing changes, I can still only see the dev resources. I look at my assigned subscriptions… nothing. I verify I’m not set on any filters… I’m not. Maybe it’s some funky propagation issue? We all know Microsoft can take their sweet ass time with propagation pretty much any service. So, I and another developer wait… and wait… and wait some more, until about 3 hours later we decide that it’s never going to work. AT this point I’m flabbergasted, I’ve signed out about half a dozen times, I’ve the other basic dumb things like incognito mode to see if it’s a caching issue, hell I even tried another computer on A HOT SPOT just to be absolutely sure it wasn’t some weird ass problem with my computer or network and still zilch.
I’m flustered and I just start poking around, trying anything and everything in Azure to figure it out. Sweet baby Jesus… I stumbled upon that most ridiculous work around ever that solved all of our problems… I’m still not entirely sure why in Sam’s hell this worked, but I have a couple of theories we can explore.
The Solution
I started with wondering what my permissions were, so I take my annoyed self over to Azure Active Directory, I view my role information, and start poking around the options.
There’s nothing in my profile and for some reason that I didn’t feel like digging into, I hit an error when I looked at assigned roles, but I finally looked at Azure Role Assignments and BAM, I see both subscriptions??? Well, I immediately click on the subscription for Production.
Now I’m click on the resource name and see where that takes me, on the left hand side under SETTINGS, I see resource groups and resources. I click into both and I’m seeing the resources!
WTF why is it working in this roundabout way?? Well… I return home and everything is now displaying as it should…. and I have access to all the things… *insert utter confusion* I have my colleague follow the same steps and everything worked exactly the same. *more confusion*
Are these even theories?
Maybe this isn’t a bug at all, maybe it’s a special “feature”. This is my favorite theory.
More likely, Azure’s service that handles these transactions was forever hung and somehow/ some why, this funky work around got the ball moving again from a display perspective. I’ve heard of something similar happening, the raised it up to Azure. When Azure finally found the issue, the VM the service lived on had ran out of memory and had to be rebooted to solve this problem…
Outside of those two theories, I really have no idea why this solved my problem. And in all honestly, it was sheer dumb luck that I stumbled upon this. Google sure as hell didn’t help me this time. If anyone else reading this has an idea or knows the actual reason why. Please enlighten me, I’d love to know!
Calling it a day
Hopefully this either provided you a laugh or maybe even helped solve your problem. I found this odd enough and I was looking for something to write about that I thought “What a perfect use case”. On to the next annoying problem!
(Yes, my grammar sucks. I don’t plan on taking the time to fix it. Sorry for the grammar police out there)