Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Azure Outage Across the Globe
hawkinspeter writes: The BBC reports that overnight an outage of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform took down many third-party sites that rely on it, in addition to disrupting Microsoft's own products. Office 365 and Xbox Live services were affected.
This happened at a particularly inopportune time, as Microsoft has recently been pushing its Azure services in an effort to catch up with other providers such as Amazon, IBM, and Google. Just a couple of hours previously, Microsoft had screened an Azure advert in the UK during the Scotland v. England soccer match." (Most services are back online. As of this writing, Application Insights is still struggling, and Europe is having problems with hosted VMs.)
This happened at a particularly inopportune time, as Microsoft has recently been pushing its Azure services in an effort to catch up with other providers such as Amazon, IBM, and Google. Just a couple of hours previously, Microsoft had screened an Azure advert in the UK during the Scotland v. England soccer match." (Most services are back online. As of this writing, Application Insights is still struggling, and Europe is having problems with hosted VMs.)
Really makes me keen to install that out-of-band patch that was spoken about yesterday across all my servers....
Global BSOD!
had a blue screen of death. Ironic, isn't it?
Cloud fail, like nobody saw that coming.
If you don't own and operate your own infrastructure, you're at the mercy of someone else.
And clearly that someone else can't guarantee you robustness with this magic cloud.
All of these people who say "awesome, because, cloud" -- well, I have yet to be convinced that any of these vendors can provide as much uptime and reliability as a decent IT department.
I suggest we start calling it Clown Computing -- you cram a lot of Clowns into a tiny little car, and hope it keeps going.
When something goes wrong, hilarity ensues.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You'd think something as big as Microsoft would roll out stuff in phases, and if it breaks, stop the rollout and reverse. How do you allow something to break everything at that scale?
Just like the Amazon AWS failure that took down Netflix, architecting your cloud infrastructure for geographic diversity can significantly reduce the likelihood of these kinds of outages.
I told you so, so many times it's all I ever think about. I knew, and was waiting for this day to come.
signed
Sys admin...
Everyone forgets that Azure is a way-beyond-massive Hyper-V implementation, and that AWS is a way-beyond-massive Xen-like-thing implementation. Even though both cloud providers let you be smart in designing your infrastructure (multi-site, redundancy, etc,...the tools are there) nothing will save you from an outage of the core guts of the system. Wasn't Azure's last failure due to a certificate expiration? There's no way an end customer can plan around that.
I'm a big fan of the private or hybrid cloud version of this fad. You get all the good stuff that Azure and AWS customers get like dynamic provisioning and software defined networking, without having to rely on a third party. Unfortunately, CIOs and other execs just see the numbers on a spreadsheet and don't take the costs of outages that you can't control into account. Power fails, networks drop, and people do stupid things in on-site implementations also. But you can at least have your staff working on it with the incentive being "you get to keep your job." With a public cloud provider or even a hoster, the responsibility ends with "oops, here's 7 hours of free service" and you have to wait in line with everyone else.
Now I have to tell my boss that clouds aren't made out of magical unicorn cotton candy crystals after all!
Juuuuust kiiiiiddding. We don't use cloud services.
Perhaps Microsoft should hire some more QA staff into OSG. I'm sure the several thousand they just laid off would be happy to make sure Azure works.
Simple, just rename it to Office 360.
Problem solved.
I mean, what happens now? If I use Azure in my business, and because this outage I have lost x dollars in business transactions that i could not carry out, is MS going to compensate me in any way? Or is Azure one those services that comes without any guarantees?
...to install the latest security patches.
I noticed that some Windows 8 apps that are in the start panel don't work. I wonder if this Azure outage is causing the Windows 8 app to not work.
The cloud = disk storage for stupid people.
I just can't get my head around the idea that somebody would take information vital to their needs and put it beyond reach, under the control of other people whose priorities probably don't match theirs.
What advantages are so overwhelming that they make this a sensible thing to do?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Isn't a cloud supposed to be, you know, *distributed*? So that this sort of thing doesn't ever happen, barring a catastrophe of no less than nation-wide proportions, where people are more liable to be more worried about other things than availability of said service anyways.
I would think this is more an illustration of a failure on Microsoft's part to properly implement their cloud services than it is indicative of a failure of such services in general.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If the service you chose, for instance, starts to go south on a regular basis, and you've built your entire ecosystem inside a specific vendor's cloud, you could be in a world of hurt.
This right here is why I don't use cloud services and do everything I can to make them unattractive to the users. The more "investment" made into a given cloud system, the more "pain" received when the cloud goes down. As things currently stand, that means I don't trust the cloud for anything other than basic commodity services that can be easily replicated by a number of cloud providers.
My experience also tells me that I am a small fish and I possess very little leverage when I deal with the cloud providers. When things go south, I am not big enough to get anyone to care so I am forced to "take what they give me". Worse, my only recourse is to take my business elsewhere, which is why my comment above is so important.
All in all, it's just not a good deal for anyone that values control. If I were a shop with little to no IT skills, I could overlook the loss of control as the payoff for not requiring an IT dept is hard to pass up. However, just as soon as you sign up and do that -- now what? Who is going to "drive" your IT dept and make your IT better tomorrow than it is today? The cloud provider? Ha!
Yes, nobody wants downtime. It has been about 2 years since I've migrated everything to Azure. In that time, I've experience a handful of outages. All of them were under an hour in duration. Last night's outage was about 3 hours, and the longest I've experienced with Azure. If that's the way the service performs, I'll accept that. Why, you may ask. Prior to Azure I had been using Amazon EC2. In that time there were only 2 outages of note. The big problem there is that those EC2 outages were measure in DAYS not hours. I would much rather have 5 1 hour outages in a year that 2 multi-day outages every two years. Small outages can sometimes fly under the radar for me if they happen during off peak times, but outages measured in days mean you're in for some hurt.
So let me get this straight.....your cloud is down and your only recourse is to depend on the cloud provider's highly skilled technicians to diagnose and fix the problem? Sign me up! There's nothing I like more than only one path forward which is completely dependent on specialists. /s
Are you kidding or do you not understand how large companies, in particular cloud companies, operate? Have you ever had to call one about an unknown issue? Try it sometime....you'll learn a lot.
. . . . from a re-used AOL floppy again?
2 of my sources for custom hosts data use it (due to demand of this data they HAD to move to AMAZON UnDDoS'able hosting) in this program of mine (for better speed, security, reliability & more) APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...
* Yes, they've "gone down" @ times too... so MS doing the same isn't exactly some event, it part of what you get with distributed loads systems - added complexity = more room for breakdown (with even single parts failing, the chain snaps).
(It's part of why I think the web's complexity, along with some bad ideas in scripting languages for browsers, is inherently overall, well... bad: Too many moving parts room for breakdown & failure, etc. (as well as avenues for attack + misuse)).
APK
P.S.=> Nothing's perfect & I honestly don't expect it ever will be completely - see subject above... apk
Please, please, please, put beta on asure.
Large cloud companies treat large clients wonderfully. Large cloud companies treat midsized clients like crap. Midsized cloud companies treat midsized client quite well. This is the sort of thing you should be discussing with your cloud agent, getting you into a rightsized relationship with your vendor. Which BTW is also likely to save you money.
Removes the need for IT staff - who exactly manages your cloud? If its you, congratulations, you are the IT staff. Just because the hardware has become 'not your problem', does not mean their is that much less to do - as a system's engineer looks after web infra and who just started getting in to AWS, my focus has shifted from doing backups, looking after hardware maintenance, out of hours outages etc, to continuing ensuring 5 9's up time, automating the infra, and...organising out of hours outages where I can for the important things Amazon needs to do behind the scenes. So yeah, almost the same job desc minus a bit of hardware babysitting.
Nothing abnormal here. Sounds like regular Microsoft availability to me.
All Microsoft servers require regular (at least monthly) patching to keep them secure.
All Microsoft products require regular restarting to keep them available and performing correctly when you want them.
Why should "Azure" be any different?
Should quit?
Casteism
Yeah, that's why Apple chose them as their iCloud provider. Are you always this retarded or only when Linus blows you?