Azure Outage... Again
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We can't even open a ticket about our VMs being down. MS Support is offline for us, too. Their outage with Azure goes so deep in their infrastructure that it disables their technical problem reporting system. So we can't file an outage, because Azure is down that hard (for us.)
This is how most Azure outages have been, both for us and for people that we have spoken to about it. This seems to be very common, they don't just lose the VMs, they lose everything including all visibility and communications channels.
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@aaronstuder said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
Microsoft says: That they will respond to the outage in eight hours.
Eight hours for Azure being 100% down (within our visible scope?) That's a pretty awful SLA for just checking their tickets to see that their platform has gone offline (within some scope.)
For all Internet facing Virtual Machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set, we guarantee you will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. - http://uptime.is/99.95
Problem there is that MS lies through their teeth about not having outages and refuses to acknowledge them. And so far, almost all outages that we've seen remove:
- Ability to open tickets
- Ability to report outages
- Ability to track downtime
- All Availability Sets and Failover
So those SLAs are totally fake. They don't even have systems for working with them. Paying for extra support would be crazy as they don't respect the support systems that they have.
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@scottalanmiller How you tried from the US?
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@aaronstuder said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller How you tried from the US?
Yup, NY and KY.
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And the client sees it down from PA and MD.
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This is what we are showing.. and we have I believe four systems running under Azure..
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Way more than four.
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What the status of your subscription?
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@aaronstuder said in Azure Outage... Again:
What the status of your subscription?
Can't check on it. The outage has taken out the system that shows it.
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Which is what we see with most outages... they lose some core database that reports subscriptions, this cascades to the console and on to the VMs. It's, and this is just me guessing, probably a database instance that handles the subscription data or some data that builds the subscription that has failed and then all of the other outages are likely from dependencies on that system. We've see that or almost exactly that a few times and tons of other companies (hundreds) that we have interfaced with (mostly via MS conferences) have reported the exact same problem as what they see most often.
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@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
Can't check on it. The outage has taken out the system that shows it.
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@gjacobse That seems like a issue.
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@aaronstuder said in Azure Outage... Again:
@gjacobse That seems like a issue.
Yes, that's why we think that their loss of subscription data is the core of the issue. Their VMs are dependent on the subscription data but they can't keep their subscription data working.
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@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
@aaronstuder said in Azure Outage... Again:
@gjacobse That seems like a issue.
Yes, that's why we think that their loss of subscription data is the core of the issue. Their VMs are dependent on the subscription data but they can't keep their subscription data working.
How would they have configured this? Wouldn't any of their servers be clustered within multiple data centers? How does this happen with such a huge service?
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@wirestyle22 said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
@aaronstuder said in Azure Outage... Again:
@gjacobse That seems like a issue.
Yes, that's why we think that their loss of subscription data is the core of the issue. Their VMs are dependent on the subscription data but they can't keep their subscription data working.
How would they have configured this? Wouldn't any of their servers be clustered within multiple data centers? How does this happen with such a huge service?
They have several known issues in this system. My guess is that they either have another external system that manipulates this one that feeds in bad data and causes outages that way, or that the code of the system that interacts with it has bugs and causes issues that way. The former, I think, is the far more likely based on a few factors - namely that account "type" often affects this. For example, because we are an MS Partner, there have been reports that some partner system has regularly connected to Azure's database and caused it to corrupt.
No amount of clustering, multiple data centers or keeping servers up can fix this problem in the least. The problem is, from what we've been told, all from their workflows and security. Basically they have an unhealthy, non-working system that is given permission to control Azure and has been known to "randomly" cause Azure to totally fail.
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This is actually a really great example of how platform high availability is so much of a myth. The Azure physical platform can do some amazing HA, but it has incredible fragile dependencies that make the HA features pointless. Who cares if the database is up and running if the data in it gets deleted by some automated process or my careless interns or whatever? Who cares if the application is running if the application itself fails? The high availability just makes people able to see the failed application, it doesn't keep anything working.
Microsoft's problem here is that their product, Azure, itself is what is failing, not the physical infrastructure or the virtualization layer that it is running on. It's the actual cloud layer, not the hypervisor or physical layer, experiencing the problem. They've made their cloud layer overly complex and with dependencies that they are not keeping as reliable as other things.
It shows that holistic risk understanding is very important and that the weakest link matters completely.
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Are you sure the client isn't just forgetting to pay the bill?
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@aaronstuder said in Azure Outage... Again:
Are you sure the client isn't just forgetting to buy the bill?
Not how it works. It's our account and we have partner credits, so even if we were not paying the bill our subscription would not go away. The VMs might turn off, I guess, but the account would not vanish. This is 100% a MS issue and it is a recurring one. There is no question where the issue is.
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We aren't wondering if Azure is down, we know that it is. We know that the issue is Microsoft's and that it is the same issue that they have been having over and over again with many companies (most that we've talked to, actually, it's more than 50% of companies that we've interfaced with report that this exact issue is one that they have experienced and have experienced MS denying it - even to our faces.) What we are asking is how localized is it. Is it just one account (maybe an account manager deleted an account.) Is it regional. Is it people on a single database server or account category?
