Microsoft's Azure Cloud Suffers Major Downtime 210
New submitter dcraid writes with a quote from El Reg: "Microsoft's cloudy platform, Windows Azure, is experiencing a major outage: at the time of writing, its service management system had been down for about seven hours worldwide. A customer described the problem to The Register as an 'admin nightmare' and said they couldn't understand how such an important system could go down. 'This should never happen,' said our source. 'The system should be redundant and outages should be confined to some data centres only.'"
The Azure service dashboard has regular updates on the situation. According to their update feed the situation should have been resolved a few hours ago but has instead gotten worse: "We continue to work through the issues that are blocking the restoration of service management for some customers in North Central US, South Central US and North Europe sub-regions. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers." To be fair, other cloud providers have had similar issues before.
2/29/2012 (Score:5, Interesting)
Leap year strikes again?
Credibility (Score:2, Interesting)
At this point, the best way to keep their credibility from further deteriorating is to provide good reports on what is going on. E.g., not like PSN, more like Amazon [amazon.com]. Currently that Azure dashboard doesn't even load for me... has it been slashdotted or something?
As an aside: whenever a cloud system goes down, people come out to rag on the reliability of the cloud. While I'm also annoyed by the marketing guys throwing around "just put it in the cloud!!" as much as anyone else, and agree some applications make no sense living in the cloud, I'd also like to point out that for some people, doing the admin work in-house results in the same amount or more headaches.
Re:But Remember - (Score:4, Interesting)
When you rely on a 3rd party for cloud storage and that 3rd party has a basically nonexistent SLA for an under 30 day outage, it becomes your own fault for making a horrible business decision.
when you take a 3rd party cloud storage solution and implement it yourself for your enterprise, guess what? it works. And if there's issues, you know who's to blame.
https://spideroak.com/diy/ [spideroak.com] - this is one example of but many.
Re:But Remember - (Score:5, Interesting)
Except this time you can add as many mainframes you wanted, dynamically. And access them over the internet. And serve content to millions of people over said internet. That wasn't possible with this clichéd "mainframes!!!!!1" nonsense. Yes, you are using a remote computer. That's the only similarity. The current terminals are far from dumb, and the server being connected to is vastly different to the mainframes of old.
I wonder how old you are? The current "Web 2.0" paradigm reminds me very much of the old 3270 style mainframe environment.
The 3270 terminal (well, the controller) was not exactly "dumb" - it had some base level of intelligence, it knew how to display forms, it could do input validation, etc but it didn't really do much with the data beyond sending it up to the mainframe. The mainframe on the backend took the data and actually did something with it. This is pretty much exactly how "Web 2.0" works, except instead of a 3270 terminal communicating to the mainframe over SNA, you have web browsers calling back to the web server over HTTP using Javascript.
Yes, both the endpoints and servers have become more capable, but there are still many similarities to the old style model.