Where are the PF-specific 101 Azure docs? Guest collabs? Perms?

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dylan-1 asked Nov 20, '22

Where are the PF-specific 101 Azure docs? Guest collabs? Perms?

I got a reply from one of Azure's official GitHub maintainers when asking what roles to apply to a guest account to collaborate, with the reply:

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"to address the question of what permissions are needed for "guest accounts" - the answer is a lot. Far more than what would entail being a "guest" account. The first error from your screenshot is the ability to register Microsoft.Web to the subscription itself. This is a very broad permission that affects far more than just functions. The other errors you have in that screenshot are all around creating supporting resources for the functions app. Again, these permissions have far broader impact than just getting a functions app up and running.

I am not familiar with what PlayFab's subscription model is. But to me, setting up a Functions App is something PlayFab would need to do on your behalf. Or maybe this even doesn't belong in the PlayFab subscription, but in your own subscription and you communicate between the PlayFab one and your own. But anyways - I am not familiar with what PlayFab's model is, so I am just throwing general ideas out there."

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When I ask PF what minimum resources I need to host Azure funcs, how to create Guest accounts for collaboration or what minimum permissions/roles are required to get a Guest account working for Functions? I am either told it's "out of their scope" or they simply do not know. As you folks are now called Azure PlayFab and forced this experience on us, it should be within your scope -- at least, the minimum to get started.

Seems like there's a desync of responsibility -- why wouldn't PF be able to help us the most basic of issues if that is our only option for cloud script? The legacy one at least let me get started fast and do basic things (yes, it was bad, but it was at least supported).

1. Not a single PF member knows even the most basic features you'd apply to a 101 quickstart. The average dev here is not soloing here with 0 devs - Guest accounts / permissions are required and after hours of research, we still never figured it out. I am currently running full admin on my client's billing account, which is reckless practice but the only way I could move on.

2. The quickstart link given is specific to Azure; not PlayFab. This helps no one and puts your devs in a hole since it doesn't show any of the prerequisites to get started (significantly more difficult than the functions, themselves). Not to mention they guide you to the most expensive resources, for what little they do show (eg: Windows costs 50% more and they blindly ask users to choose that one without explanation).

You guys (PF) need training -- and bare minimum responsibility to at least offer documentation specific to PF instead of just shooting us a general link to enterprise infra. Since your Quickstart nonchalantly links to raw Azure to "figure it out" (requiring quite the vast amount of research/training/education), this also misleads new PF users into believing that it's easy to set this up. It is not.

Please take an ounce of responsibility and help your devs, please, with some docs and bare minimum training.

1. How to create an Azure account (if you create the "free trial" that the average person will do,for example, you cannot even create a Function and will get vague errors because trials are limited to 32-bit, while Funcs are 64-bit).

2. How to create a guest account - it's not intuitive at all. Even finding the correct place to add is not intuitive - and you need to add in more than one place.

3. Permissions/Roles - The errors show what permissions are missing, but don't say what roles are required. If I get a storage error and browse storage roles, there are about 20. All collaborators likely are all admin'd up because no one has any clue what roles to add, even if you figure out #2.

4. How to create a Function - step by step, going for the most minimalistic pricing as well. NO, don't select "Windows" - show devs to choose Linux. Emphasize US west 2. If there are common errors, show the FAQ as they are all incredibly vague.

Help out your own users so we can help out others. NO ONE KNOWS! If PF doesn't know, how do you expect your users to know?

(Apologies for the aggressiveness of this post, but this really should have gone unsaid - I am utterly shocked how long it took me to get this rolling, how 0 support is offered and even 0 docs specific to PF. This has been an absolutely horrible, alpha-like experience)

CloudScript

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Answer 1 · 2022-11-22T05:09:06Z

dylan-1 answered Nov 22, '22

The answer given feels very shrugged off, where the answer is essentially "blind eyes see no evil". So to further iterate upon that:

Your general Azure Quickstart link gives all kinds of issues right off the bat since it's not specific to PF. Again,

The tutorial even selects "Windows" by default without any explanation or disclaimer that this selection is suddenly +50% fee for doing the same thing. This does not do anyone any favors, as you'd have to restructure everything once the dev finds out later. This is also not transparent, creating what's essentially "hidden fees".
When you sign up for Azure, the average dev will select free trial (that also offers +credits) -- who wouldn't for $200 for free? However, creating a Function is not allowed on the trial. How is anyone supposed to know this? Even the error gives a vague quota error, knowingly digging your users into a rabbit hole, thirsty for answers. The permissions required are "a lot", as the Azure dev mentioned - and no one knows what they are.
1. As a side note: I don't even have the permission to open a ticket about permissions unless granted full admin (until a proper guide is found).
When you create a Function, the quickstart mentions to get a US West server. However, this is globally limited due to overloading demand here on Linux. Instead, the average person gets a vague quota error, once again, similar to #2 -- you need to open a ticket and explain yourself verbosely to be "granted" the ability to choose a US West server on Linux. This took a massive amount of time to discover.
No one requested info about guest account setup because you turn all PF<>Azure questions to Azure, even for the most basic. Not every PF/Azure account is going to be owned by a technical person, and not every billing account is also going to be the sole developer. If no one considered the possibility of collaboration, then this alone is an oversight. What the average person likely did is just given the Guest admin out of frustration, like we did - and the average person will leave no feedback.

The frustration comes from the deception that PF made it appear so easy to create cloud functions, when the reality is that we're alpha testing this Azure feature that no one - not even staff - knows about or cares to know about. Even creating a ticket requires special permissions that you, again, need to guide a non-technical person through to let you know. I am sure there will be many devs in the future that can relate. Azure tickets require existing permissions (even if you don't understand the permissions) with confusing Q+A responses a good week later that leads to even more confusion and weeks of delay -- it's clearly a heavily outsourced ticket service for the cheaper tier.

While PF can surely carry on the way they are doing, this is simply feedback from someone that has experienced a great number of competitor services and hope you will have some will to improve yourselves on this matter, one day. Until then, for shame at the level of responsibility you have shown for this module and the apathy regarding how this reflects on the level of PF's care to their users.

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Answer 2 · 2022-11-21T07:15:00Z

Gosen Gao answered Nov 21, '22

>> I am not familiar with what PlayFab's subscription model is. But to me, setting up a Functions App is something PlayFab would need to do on your behalf. Or maybe this even doesn't belong in the PlayFab subscription, but in your own subscription and you communicate between the PlayFab one and your own.

To be clear, the model of PlayFab is “Or maybe this even doesn't belong in the PlayFab subscription, but in your own subscription and you communicate between the PlayFab one and your own". PlayFab doesn’t have any feature to create or manage Azure Function because for most scenarios, Playfab only executes Azure Function with additional information as parameters. As the “Function” authentication level is recommended, after the AF is deployed, a unique Function URL is generated, which is required to register on PlayFab Game Manager. You can directly call this URL, but since the request is not proper, the response won’t be useful. What PlayFab API does is to collect information and create/format an HTTP request to send to Azure Function in the backend, so that data can be parsed in a specific format.

As the maintainer is not familiar with PlayFab, we also don't know the details about Azure. There is no Guest Account in PlayFab because Login API will generate new accounts, and players are only allowed to call PlayFab API to access AF ( A PlayFab account is required). “Guest Account” that you have mentioned is a feature of Azure. So, if you want a “Guest Account” to manage the Azure Functions in your Azure subscription, you need to contact Azure support for help.

>> As you folks are now called Azure PlayFab and forced this experience on us, it should be within your scope -- at least, the minimum to get started.

To get started with Azure Functions, you can follow PlayFab CloudScript using Azure Functions Quickstart Guide - PlayFab | Microsoft Learn. After you create an Azure Function, if you have any issues on registering AF on Game Manager, or encountering execution errors, please feel free to let us know. Since the documentation doesn't mention "Guest Account" and no other developers have asked similar questions. And from your statement I don’t see there is any permission issue related to PlayFab and the error shows permission issue in your Azure Subscription. If you are enterprise customer, you may consult our sales team for collaboration of subscriptions but for the common Azure Subscription permission issue, you need to consult Azure support team.

>> The quickstart link given is specific to Azure; not PlayFab.

Since creating/managing Azure Functions is not related to PlayFab, that’s why “The quickstart link given is specific to Azure; not PlayFab”.

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