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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.)
Global BSOD!
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.
I installed it last night on all domain controllers after testing it in my isolated testing network. It's not really optional since it allows any domain user to become domain admin and the only resolution to that is a domain rebuild or authoritative restore. It's also already been seen in attacks in the wild so you can assume the next client to get driveby malware will be going for domain admin.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
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.
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?
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......
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.
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.