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Major Azure Outage

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Re: Major Azure Outage

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, we actually chose it, as we´re a Microsoft shop. Hasn´t been that bad, but we did experience 2 major outages in 1 year. Not sure how many outages are there on AWS.

AWS has had a couple cascading EBS failures in us-east-1 years ago which affected a lot of services since it's a foundational building block of the whole system. It's been a reason to prefer instance storage for quite awhile imo. I've run most everything in us-west-2 Oregon the last 5+ years and I can't remember a similar sort of outage there in that time-frame. A widespread world-wide outage like is happening now on…

Outages happen all the time on both of the providers - they just don't happen globally and usually it isn't a global outage.

One that does come to mind is the S3 outage a few years ago, which was essentially a global outage.

Re: Major Azure Outage

#32
Public clouds will have outages - that's not the point. What's most concerning about this outage is that it is across all regions. That violates the fundamental assumption, of developing for the cloud, that failures in every region are independent.

If regions fail independently and a failure in 1-2 regions brought down my system, that's my fault. But if region failures aren't independent and a global outage such as this is possible - well, that's pretty bad.

Re: Major Azure Outage

#33
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you going to tell them when the other cloud services have their inevitable outages?

I'm not the parent, but I maintain services on both AWS and Azure, and in the last few years, I can definitely say the outages on Azure have been more frequent and more severe. The only AWS outages I recall are S3 and the Dyn DNS issue that brought many other providers down too.

The Dyn DNS outage was easier to explain. Half of the internet is down, it's not just AWS.

Re: Major Azure Outage

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the parent, but I maintain services on both AWS and Azure, and in the last few years, I can definitely say the outages on Azure have been more frequent and more severe. The only AWS outages I recall are S3 and the Dyn DNS issue that brought many other providers down too.

The Dyn DNS outage was easier to explain. Half of the internet is down, it's not just AWS.

Exactly. As an AWS customer, that outage didn't really bother me because it was obvious it impacted many other unrelated services too.

Re: Major Azure Outage

#35

Public clouds will have outages - that's not the point. What's most concerning about this outage is that it is across all regions. That violates the fundamental assumption, of developing for the cloud, that failures in every region are independent. If regions fail independently and a failure in 1-2 regions brought down my system, that's my fault. But if region failures aren't independent and a global outage such as t…

Yup, fully agreed. Nobody can keep sql instances or hosts up forever. They will go down. Further, humans work on this stuff. Humans make mistakes. Bad config push, bad code push, lightning hitting a data center, human vandalism, etc. will happen.

What shouldn't happen ever is that your entire cloud goes down because somebody pushed a bad config change to a service that serves literally your entire cloud.

Microsoft clearly hasn't architected everything to be region-independent. There are things that will always be somewhat global, but Azure seems pretty bad at this. This isn't the first time even in the past 12 months that they've had a global outage.

Re: Major Azure Outage

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has had a couple cascading EBS failures in us-east-1 years ago which affected a lot of services since it's a foundational building block of the whole system. It's been a reason to prefer instance storage for quite awhile imo. I've run most everything in us-west-2 Oregon the last 5+ years and I can't remember a similar sort of outage there in that time-frame. A widespread world-wide outage like is happening now on…

> It's been a reason to prefer instance storage for quite awhile imo. Yuck. Please tell me you don't do that anymore (unless for specialized workloads where you don't care if an instance loses data due to a shutdown).

I still do it all the time - but I consider each instance disposable and all data is replicated to at least two other hosts in different AZs.
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