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Certificate Expiry Leads to Total Outage For Microsoft Azure Secured Storage
rtfa-troll writes "There has been a worldwide (all locations) total outage of storage in Microsoft's Azure cloud. Apparently, 'Microsoft unwittingly let an online security certificate expire Friday, triggering a worldwide outage in an online service that stores data for a wide range of business customers,' according to the San Francisco Chronicle (also Yahoo and the Register). Perhaps too much time has been spent sucking up to storage vendors and not enough looking after the customers? This comes directly after a week-long outage of one of Microsoft's SQL server components in Azure. This is not the first time that we have discussed major outages on Azure and probably won't be the last. It's certainly also not the first time we have discussed Microsoft cloud systems making users' data unavailable."
It is almost a year ago to the day Azure was down for a day because no one accounted for leap year for validating certificates, lol. AWS seems to have issues too, but they don't seem to revolve around blatant stupidity and result in an entire day of downtime.
I wonder how long it will be before there's a major failure loop in the cloud, something like the certificate for cloud X is stored in service Y, which actually uses cloud X as its backend. So when certificate for X stops, the whole thing grinds to a halt with no way to restart it (unless backdoors)...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
You'd think that, but there's contract stuff. The thing is, you basically need a department in charge of renewing shit like this when you have enterprise level services. We've got a site with millions of hits daily and still manage to let it expire every couple of years. You try the credit card thing, but credit cards expire. You try recurring billing and then you get into a contractual nightmare with the registrar. The registrar isn't going to do you any favors, you might get millions of hits daily, but they still only get $5/year even from google.com so fuck you, figure out the billing yourself.
The only real way to do it effectively is build yourself a database of all the crap you need to renew regularly, then hire someone to renew that stuff. But who are you going to hire? It usually ends up being some assistant that doesn't know a damned thing about tech... and it's still going to cost you $60k a year in pay and bennifits to retain them. That's an expensive way of keeping track of such things... ah, the website admins can remember right?
On the other hand, I've worked at places where the worst thing you could do is leave things that the company can't live without *in* the control of the company. Sometimes certain areas of expertise require specializations that the company just doesn't have and isn't interested in acquiring. Of course handing the responsibility of those things off to *Microsoft* is not necessarily any better.