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Microsoft Azure Outage Across the Globe

Posted by Soulskill on from the maybe-you-should-call-it-office364 dept.

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.)

13 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Yawn ... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Yawn ... by dontbemad · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Once again, missing the point. In my (small) shop, by using azure (which has worked well for us), we avoid having to use money to hire admins to maintain any sort of in house servers we might have. We can then put that money towards more developers (or better salaries for us current devs), as well as paying for training, nicer dev machines, etc. At the same time, if we do have a problem with any sort of hosted service through azure, support is literally a phone call away, and I can't remember the last time a resolution didn't happen within a couple hours.

      Sure, cloud computing has its short-comings. But it has also allowed a litany of small companies who simply can't afford to own their own infrastructure to do business.

    2. Re:Yawn ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Right. Because in-house infrastructure never fails.

      Power outages never happen.

      Lines are never cut.

      Patches never fail and rollbacks always work. ... can I come live in make-believe-land with you?

    3. Re:Yawn ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I spent 6 months earlier this year on behalf of our IT Director (who wanted us to go to cloud really badly, because, well, cloud) studying the costs and efforts of doing so. My conclusion was that over a 5 year period, cloud hosting would cost us TEN TIMES the cost of hosting internally. I expected this report to end this discussion, but it didn't.

      My director pointed out I hadn't taken into account the fewer people we would need to manage things (which I pointed out was horseshit, we do colo hosting now and visit our datacenter sites maybe 2-3 times a year now).

      I think, aside from people having ideas that cloud is magic, it comes down to the accounting lure of a low monthly fee (operational costs) vs high one-time costs when you buy equipment (generally capital costs). It's very short term thinking.

      Point one: Unless you're talking about short-term projects or workloads, cloud is probably far more expensive than in-house for most companies over time.

      Point two: Cloud hosting is just another form of Colo. Instead of you paying for racks, or portions of racks, you're paying for VM space (portions of a server). It's just colo.

    4. Re:Yawn ... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sure, but when you have outages and stability issues which impact your business, is it really a good trade off?

      Of course it is. Outsource to the cloud and cut the quarterly costs massively by laying off staff. Get a big bonus. Possibly share options go up due to better profits and blathering to the shareholders about the cloud. Sure 3 years down the line it might tank for a few days and in one fell swoop wipe out all the savings and then some.

      Not my problem, I'll be long gone.

      So is it worth it? Hell yes!

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    5. Re:Yawn ... by Bengie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There are many reasons to use the cloud.

      1) You're too small to afford enough full time IT
      2) You can't afford the capital investment into your own servers
      3) You need a low latency global CDN like service, but you can't afford dedicated servers running everywhere
      4) You need only temporarily need to scale up your servers to handle burst load
      5) I'm sure there are other reasons.

    6. Re:Yawn ... by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, the "cloud" servers sometimes have outages. So do managed hosting providers. So do internal servers. And frankly, although every business thinks that what they're doing is super-important and they can't afford even the briefest outage, the fact is that most businesses can.

      If Azure or AWS go down for an hour, it makes news and everyone freaks out because a lot of people are using them. If your business's server goes down for an hour, it does not make news, and people don't freak out. But for the business experiencing that 1 hour of downtime, what difference does it make whether they own the hardware or it's in "the cloud".

    7. Re:Yawn ... by Jaime2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The calculations are simple when you assume the cloud will fail and your infrastructure will not. A real tradeoff calculation has to include estimates of the reliability of both scenarios. The answer to "Is it really a good trade off?" will be entirely based on estimates and opinions. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that the math does not spit out "no-brainer".

      Some cloud providers will even give you SLAs with real money behind them. So, they could conceivably come up with a no-brainer deal where the cloud provider guarantees your $80,000 every day, whether it's from having your business up and running or writing you a check.

    8. Re:Yawn ... by segedunum · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Once again, missing the point. In my (small) shop, by using azure (which has worked well for us), we avoid having to use money to hire admins to maintain any sort of in house servers we might have.

      Who maintains your Azure infrastructure (I hope you built in all that lovely redundancy for these problems) and how often do you really need to maintain internal servers? If these are on 24x7 you're going to be paying through the nose and if you miss a monthly fee, off you go. Not to mention that cloud servers are horrifically under resourced compared to hardware you can buy, so you generally need many more of them, and none of the bandwidth, I/O or CPU resources are guaranteed to be yours no matter what your meaningless agreement says.

      We can then put that money towards more developers (or better salaries for us current devs), as well as paying for training, nicer dev machines, etc.

      Ahhh, yes. Developers who believe deployment can be bypassed as a cost and running applications in production (which is kind of important to any company running web applications and who relies on them for income) simply doesn't matter.

      At the same time, if we do have a problem with any sort of hosted service through azure, support is literally a phone call away, and I can't remember the last time a resolution didn't happen within a couple hours.

      You've been exceptionally lucky, or you're being economical with the truth ;-).

      Sure, cloud computing has its short-comings. But it has also allowed a litany of small companies who simply can't afford to own their own infrastructure to do business.

      I've also seen a litany of small companies go out of business with cashflow issues who thought like that. Funny that. Yes, the infrastructure is cheaper if you don't run it all the time. I think I once calculated that if you have a server on for more than eight hours a day then you're simply being milked for a monthly fee.

    9. Re:Yawn ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This is why I drill for my own natural gas. You never know when the gas company will have an outage.

    10. Re:Yawn ... by uncqual · · Score: 4, Insightful

      However, in a widespread outage like this, I'll bet the big cloud providers have a better record of rapid recovery than their customers had in-house. By necessity, MS, Amazon et al have very competent engineers who know the product well available to pull off what they are doing (including sleeping) and jump into any really serious problem. There simply are not enough such engineers to go around all the mid-sized IT organizations in the world nor interesting enough work to keep these engineers interested and sharp at most of these IT organizations (to say nothing of the cost of keeping such engineers around).

      For a car analogy... When your high end car has a nagging problem that your local mechanic can't figure out, the dealer often can figure it out quickly, possibly with the help of a factory specialist who deals with (say) ECUs on only this make all day, every day. Rarely can an independent mechanic specialize enough to come close to the factory specialists in diagnosis. Now, if your car just has a dead battery, your local mechanic may give you faster, better, and cheaper service than the dealer.

      --
      Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.
  2. Re: Out of band patch.. by Eosi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Interesting... What about all the Open SSL or SSH issues that happened this year, which in many cases were default as part of Linux servers???
    Regardless of OS, poor testing of third party apps / services or poor security as part of your deployment, can cause you to be violated. I have seen many Linux server still using Telnet or VNC for management, and allowing ROOT to login directly to them....
    Secure your environment regardless of what you run......

  3. Awesome! wait on experts so we can run again by tacokill · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.