Microsoft brings Azure back online Microsoft has managed to repair its Windows Azure cloud, after an expired SSL certificate downed storage and other services for people across the world. Ninety-nine percent of the affected services have been brought back online, Redmond said early in the hours of Saturday morning, Pacific Time. "We will continue monitoring …
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I thought Windows Azure is intended to be a sort of proof of concept technology advertisement. A carefully constructed and managed demonstration run by the corporation which creates and sells the underlying software - for the purpose of illustrating to the world what can be expected of it.
It would appear to be fulfilling its role rather well.
Too complicated for even its own super-mega-corp creator to operate? Splendid, I'll have some of that. Where do I sign?
REM Microsoft business model
REM (c) 1975 by Microsoft Software Co.
10 INPUT OPPORTUNITY$
20 INPUT CLIENT$
30 SET OUTPUT=CLIENT$
40 PRINT "Microsoft can do that"
50 PRINT "We've had a project like that for years"
53 PRINT "We can deliver something better in half the time for half the cost"
60 INPUT BUDGET$
70 INPUT SCHEDULE$
80 SIGN CONTRACT$
90 GET BUDGET$
100 PAUSE
101 NEW PROJECT$
102 PAUSE
107 LET SCHEDULE$ = SCHEDULE$ + SCHEDULE$
110 PRINT "Microsoft Software Inc is leveraging new technologies for expediteization of revolutionary solutionization"
140 LET BUDGET$ = BUDGET$ + BUDGET$
150 PAUSE
160 PRINT "Microsoft "; OPPORTUNITY$ ; " is the next generation solution to leverage enterprize monitization"
170 LET SCREENSHOTS$ = RANDOM
180 PRINT SCREENSHOTS$
200 LET SCHEDULE$ = SCHEDULE$ + SCHEDULE$
210 PAUSE
220 LET BUDGET$ = BUDGET$ + BUDGET$
230 GET BUDGET$
240 GET SMALL_COMPANY_EXPERIMENTING_IN_FIELD$
250 PAUSE
260 LET PROJECT$ = SMALL_COMPANY_EXPERIMENTING_IN_FIELD$
270 PAUSE
280 RANDOMIZE PROJECT$
290 RANDOMIZE PROJECT$
300 PRINT "Microsoft Software Inc, the worlds leading enterprize solution provider announces "; OPPORTUNITY$ ; " Pro XP 3000"
310 DUMP PROJECT$
320 GOTO 10
RUN
OK, so this happened last year, presumably on the annual renewal date. It begs how incompetent Microsoft is:
1. Most secure cert registrars send out e-mail reminders (mine does with 90, 30 and 7 days to go) - did whoever they registered with not send such e-mails or did Microsoft just ignore them?
2. A simple cron job to check the cert and e-mail (to more than one person!) every day at least 7 days before expiry would have saved their bacon.
3. When they messed up last year, why didn't they renew the cert for more than one year? Surely Microsoft can afford a multi-year cert?!
Multiple levels of incompetence there - that's Microsoft for you.
The people directly involved probably did know, but then had to find out who to bribe/blackmail into procuring a new certificate before the old one went belly up.
Some of these big companies have an unbelievable amount of red tape and disparate divisions which are so out of touch with each-other they may as well be separate companies.
"Real enterprises don't use local schedulers, rather centralised scheduling. Anyone who thinks cron or windows scheduler is an acceptable solution in an enterprise, still has a lot to lean about IT."
Agreed. In this case even a good old calender reminder would have avoided this, though.
It really doesn't matter how they schedule things, as long as they do it, which apparently wasn't the case here.
"The global outage lasted for around 12 hours and occurred because Microsoft failed to renew a security certificate."
All this talk of how Cloud will revolutionize business and yet nobody describes exactly what it is.
It is merely an internet computing Cluster which can be adapted to suite power required.
It will save you from buying your own Cluster hardware and managing it but requires paying for by the hour with the loss of data security. Your Cloud vendor has access to your valuable IP and customer data.
An advancement from Shared Plesk website hosting, Virtual/Dedicated Servers. You can upload your own machine image or build for the Cloud.
Some allow SQL others LINQ and Hadoop.
Hadoop may be fast but this comes at a cost of omitting required DBMS features. A DB change could result in a lot of code rewrite. Is it Transaction safe and does it allow online backups? When you add all the features of a DBMS it quickly comes down in speed.
As for LINQ, is it really much simpler to use than SQL. You could suffer an unnecessary performance penalty.
The marketing folks pushing Cloud need to understand its not the magic bullet that the industry desperately needs.
Cloud is like the recent beef/horse food chain debacle.
Lots of managers looking around saying "Why would I want to pay to maintain a known chain of suppliers, a whole lot of equipment, and staff, when I can just buy it cheaper through a long chain of third party suppliers, and I won't have all that work managing all them things"... "think about how big my bonus will be when I deliver all them savings".
Nope ... no chair smash against the wall this time. Monkey-boy has no doubt called the Azure crew into his office, and he's smashed his chairs on their monkey-butts.
Atta boy, Ballmer. I read the piece in Fortune Magazine awhile back about how M$ motivates its crew. He had to expect that this was comin' down the pipeline.
2013 ... the year all the monkeys came to dance on Monkey-Boy's head.
Redundant Hardware: Check.
Redundant Network: Check.
Redundant DNS: Check.
Redundant Services: Check.
Single point of failure at certificate services: Check, wait not FAIL, crap ARRAHHH.
Design tip for next time, find a way for your services to use two different set of certificates from two different providers. Make sure the expiry dates differ. Have stuff warn, but not fail if there is a problem with one.
I'd like my consulting fee now.
...The "Microsoft Attitude". Of course they know better, that's why they work that way.
It goes back to MS-DOS (probably before). A company unwilling to accept "outside opinions", getting stuck in its ways.
For the observant, there seem to be many current examples, too numerous to show here, I'll let the reader fill in the b l a n k s.
"We will continue monitoring the health of the Storage service and SSL traffic for the next 24 hours..."
...and then we will ignore the situation for 364 days, until our cert once again expires.
Only for 24 hours? Surely not, but surely they'd also be a little more careful in their phrasing, one would think.
It's really rather clever. By omitting to renew a single certificate -- and administrative "error" that could be made on any service, regardless of the operating system that supports it -- Microsoft downed their own cloud service for a short while, demonstrating to world+canine that cloud services can't be guaranteed to be 100% available, and that if you rely on the cloud for your work (or play) you're stuffed when the service goes away.
I'm sure the lesson Microsoft want you to take away from this is that you should do all your work on an actual PC running an installed OS and software. You might choose to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office -- most people do -- go out and buy yours today.
Result!
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