Want to provision a new VM on Azure? Get in line Multiple Microsoft customers have for the past nineteen hours been unable to provision new virtual machines in Azure's UK West and UK South regions. Although there has been no formal notification on the Azure status page, The Register has seen a copy of a Microsoft issue summary report indicating issues since Wednesday morning …
I'll bite...
I can buy the sensible cost savings as long as you can quantify the cost of having an unavailable phone system. And moaning about not having it on twitter doesn't make you money. I guess it saves the awkward conversations with customers that you convinced to use cloud to...
As people using cloud services during outages or system faults have discovered before - when something goes wrong, what is the backup plan and does it actually work?
Who needs phones anyway? A total phone system outage for a day doesn't kill a healthy business.
While basically cancelling your phone line every night and buying it again in the morning does seem like a balmy move, the real LOL lies in their inflexibility to use the cloud responsibly.
Why don't they just deploy their backup system in another Azure DC?
This issue is also affecting Batch Services as batch services spin up compute under the bonnet. We have P1's raised under enterprise support and have only 1 message sent at 18:00 yesterday.
Really poor stuff from Microsoft. If you try to create a new vm via the portal at the moment you get an error saying that services are unavailable in the region, and prompted to use another data centre.
A colleague with another consultancy I know also have another 2 P1's raised with little or no feedback either.
Looks like amateur hour in the UKWest datacentre this week....
and microsoft is snoring.
Sorry, could not resist.
I hope that some of the PHB's piling into 'Cloud' as the solution to everything will learn from this but who am I kidding, they won't.
We are Doomed I tell ye, doomed.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is always the best solution....
"a massive hosting provider would have monitoring in place to keep track of capacity, and ramp things up when usage gets to a critical level."
Of course within reason. But if a lot of people decide to migrate a few thousand VMs on the same day, or someone decides to pay to spin up tens of thousands of new ones it could conceivably out pace reasonable planning. Or there could have been a significant failure - e.g. a complete container, etc. Microsoft's containerised datacentres do mean that they can add capacity fairly rapidly when needed though...
The statement from which the above phrase was plucked should be on every single proposal to "The Board", putting forward the argument for not adopting a Cloud first policy.
There are mechanisms in place to help prevent a run on a banking institution, but what would happen if everyone wanted access to their data in The Cloud at the exact same moment in time? Let's say you run a media organisation and some major event occurs. Would normal business for you be possible? Take 7/7 for example, the whole of the cellular network in london seemed to suffer an outage as presumably the emergency services had first dibs on bandwidth. If your organisation were required in some way to cover that event, you wouldn't be able to, even if you did have some eye-watering SLA's in place. Your average SME is sure to be affected - as mentioned in the original article, a company shutting down and starting up their phone system every day: that to me is a major risk factor, regardless of whether the idea is a prudent one or not.
The government's reaction to any lobbying for action in the wake of such events would mean regulating cloud services, which would straight away give such organisations an excuse to hike prices. And guess, what, since you've long since disposed of your on-prem infrastructure, you've no option but to swallow those increases.
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