Live data from Hacker News

Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

modern-products.tumblr.com

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

#41

I tried Microsoft Azure for a month because I received free credits via their BizSpark program. I can confidently say their uptime is the worst I have ever seen. Nearly daily servers would loose access to disks and switch to read-only mode. Also, they lack any ability to snapshot backup servers, which is a basic requirement of a cloud platform. I know its early, and they are just starting, but I just don't have confi…

I have a VM on azure, and no downtime in last 3 months. Also, didn't notice any problems with disks.

I'd second this. I've found that VM's (especially Windows) run even more reliably than what I had on EC2 (sometimes the machines just got soooo slow on EC2 for no apparent reason)

Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

#42
post #13

This is a nice gesture, but I prefer the services I use to take responsibility for their provider and technology choices. Your customers don't care that Azure is down, they only care that they can't do whatever they were trying to accomplish. This isn't Azure's fault. It's yours. Don't pass the buck.

How is this different from, say, a coffee shop saying "sorry, we're closed because the electricity went out"?

Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

#43
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a VM on azure, and no downtime in last 3 months. Also, didn't notice any problems with disks.

I'd second this. I've found that VM's (especially Windows) run even more reliably than what I had on EC2 (sometimes the machines just got soooo slow on EC2 for no apparent reason)

When a server gets slow, log in and look at top or vmstat. There's a field called st that stands for steal time. If you're using a micro, you have higher peak CPU available, but lower baseline. We found they were notoriously bad about the average CPU we got and our default is now a small (we also moved to non-ebs backed instances for the primary drive for other reasons, which is unavailable on micros). If your steal time is high, you're over your CPU budget and it's time to look at a bigger instance.

Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

#44
post #13

This is a nice gesture, but I prefer the services I use to take responsibility for their provider and technology choices. Your customers don't care that Azure is down, they only care that they can't do whatever they were trying to accomplish. This isn't Azure's fault. It's yours. Don't pass the buck.

How is this different from, say, a coffee shop saying "sorry, we're closed because the electricity went out"?

I guess the difference would be that there is usually only one electric company that can supply you with power.

Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

#45
Looks like Azure is having problems in the US south-central region [1], but fine everywhere else. The fact that they don't mention their region suggests they may not understand the implications.

If the status page is accurate, their downtime is just poor planning on their part. Same goes for Amazon. If you're stranded in one region, you're asking for downtime.

[1] http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/service-dashboard/

Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

#46
post #13

This is a nice gesture, but I prefer the services I use to take responsibility for their provider and technology choices. Your customers don't care that Azure is down, they only care that they can't do whatever they were trying to accomplish. This isn't Azure's fault. It's yours. Don't pass the buck.

They're not passing the buck, they're voicing their unhappiness. It's important that this happens, because it damages the reputation of cloud providers that go down a lot (like AWS' US-EAST). Being down for 24 hours is pretty impressive, in a bad way.

Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

#47

Perhaps this is part of your current problem with Azure, but is it possible to retain some part of your frontpage during an outage like this? Or failover to a static page with a basic description of the service? Your support site seems to look ok. I only make the suggestion because I was not aware of Soluto. I went to your homepage and see the outage notice and a link to support. I still have no idea what your servic…

my point exactly.

Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

#49
post #13

This is a nice gesture, but I prefer the services I use to take responsibility for their provider and technology choices. Your customers don't care that Azure is down, they only care that they can't do whatever they were trying to accomplish. This isn't Azure's fault. It's yours. Don't pass the buck.

I don't think this is a server-to-customers message, but rather a programmer-to-other-programmers message.

Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.

#50
post #30

For those who are curious Cached copy of the front page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0vf1uUF... Their support site: https://support.soluto.com/home (not down) Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soluto Soluto alternatives: http://alternativeto.net/software/soluto/

Wikipedia says that one of their remote features is: "Defrag the hard drives"

Someone pushed the wrong button there? ;)

Seriously, that just reminded me of running Windows back in the old days. You had to make sure to have the latest AV, do system upgrades all the time and of course defrag the drives... yay

Post reply on HN