5 ms·

When I tell my clients Azure had another outage they're going to demand we move to another cloud service. Looks like I'm in for a looong couple weeks.

mattbillenstein 7y ago
How did you get on Azure to begin with?
- ecaron 7y ago
  I'm guessing he inherited it. I'm guessing most people on this thread are in that boat.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - GFischer 7y ago
    In my case, we actually chose it, as we´re a Microsoft shop. Hasn´t been that bad, but we did experience 2 major outages in 1 year. Not sure how many outages are there on AWS.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      AWS has one or two a year from what I've seen... IIRC gcp has had outages too... Unless you're designing with several safeguards in place across multiple regions and cloud providers, there's no getting around it. Everyone has down time, it's just often coordinated to a lot of people when it does happen. It's still generally less than when you try to self host on a cloud provider, it's just not your mistake that did it.
      - outworlder 7y ago
        > AWS has one or two a year from what I've seen Worldwide outage? That's really not the case. Over thousands of machines in 3 years I haven't seen a single failure that spanned more than one region. Or even a region going entirely offline. At most you'll see one service affected.
      - goobynight 7y ago
        "an" outage is different from a global outage though. I'm not sure what the SLA is on a single region, but going down 0-2 times per year is a reasonable expectation, depending on the length of each one. If you want more, you have to have regional failover. Azure is burning error budget in every region today and you would need to failover to a different cloud provider or your own datacenter. If I'm interpreting this correctly, there was no plan you could implement solely in Azure that could have helped you today.
    - mattbillenstein 7y ago
      AWS has had a couple cascading EBS failures in us-east-1 years ago which affected a lot of services since it's a foundational building block of the whole system. It's been a reason to prefer instance storage for quite awhile imo. I've run most everything in us-west-2 Oregon the last 5+ years and I can't remember a similar sort of outage there in that time-frame. A widespread world-wide outage like is happening now on Azure is a red flag imo.
      - outworlder 7y ago
        > It's been a reason to prefer instance storage for quite awhile imo. Yuck. Please tell me you don't do that anymore (unless for specialized workloads where you don't care if an instance loses data due to a shutdown).
        mattbillenstein 7y ago
        I still do it all the time - but I consider each instance disposable and all data is replicated to at least two other hosts in different AZs.
      - cheeze 7y ago
        Outages happen all the time on both of the providers - they just don't happen globally and usually it isn't a global outage. One that does come to mind is the S3 outage a few years ago, which was essentially a global outage.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lghh 7y ago
What are you going to tell them when the other cloud services have their inevitable outages?
- PlanetLotus 7y ago
  I'm not the parent, but I maintain services on both AWS and Azure, and in the last few years, I can definitely say the outages on Azure have been more frequent and more severe. The only AWS outages I recall are S3 and the Dyn DNS issue that brought many other providers down too.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    The Dyn DNS outage was easier to explain. Half of the internet is down, it's not just AWS.
    - PlanetLotus 7y ago
      Exactly. As an AWS customer, that outage didn't really bother me because it was obvious it impacted many other unrelated services too.
- cheeze 7y ago
  I'd tell them "other providers have inevitable outages, however..." 1. The other providers have a better track record 2. The other providers don't go down globally multiple times a year

mattbillenstein 7y ago

How did you get on Azure to begin with?

ecaron 7y ago
I'm guessing he inherited it. I'm guessing most people on this thread are in that boat.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- GFischer 7y ago
  In my case, we actually chose it, as we´re a Microsoft shop. Hasn´t been that bad, but we did experience 2 major outages in 1 year. Not sure how many outages are there on AWS.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    AWS has one or two a year from what I've seen... IIRC gcp has had outages too... Unless you're designing with several safeguards in place across multiple regions and cloud providers, there's no getting around it. Everyone has down time, it's just often coordinated to a lot of people when it does happen. It's still generally less than when you try to self host on a cloud provider, it's just not your mistake that did it.
    - outworlder 7y ago
      > AWS has one or two a year from what I've seen Worldwide outage? That's really not the case. Over thousands of machines in 3 years I haven't seen a single failure that spanned more than one region. Or even a region going entirely offline. At most you'll see one service affected.
    - goobynight 7y ago
      "an" outage is different from a global outage though. I'm not sure what the SLA is on a single region, but going down 0-2 times per year is a reasonable expectation, depending on the length of each one. If you want more, you have to have regional failover. Azure is burning error budget in every region today and you would need to failover to a different cloud provider or your own datacenter. If I'm interpreting this correctly, there was no plan you could implement solely in Azure that could have helped you today.
  - mattbillenstein 7y ago
    AWS has had a couple cascading EBS failures in us-east-1 years ago which affected a lot of services since it's a foundational building block of the whole system. It's been a reason to prefer instance storage for quite awhile imo. I've run most everything in us-west-2 Oregon the last 5+ years and I can't remember a similar sort of outage there in that time-frame. A widespread world-wide outage like is happening now on Azure is a red flag imo.
    - outworlder 7y ago
      > It's been a reason to prefer instance storage for quite awhile imo. Yuck. Please tell me you don't do that anymore (unless for specialized workloads where you don't care if an instance loses data due to a shutdown).
      - mattbillenstein 7y ago
        I still do it all the time - but I consider each instance disposable and all data is replicated to at least two other hosts in different AZs.
    - cheeze 7y ago
      Outages happen all the time on both of the providers - they just don't happen globally and usually it isn't a global outage. One that does come to mind is the S3 outage a few years ago, which was essentially a global outage.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lghh 7y ago

What are you going to tell them when the other cloud services have their inevitable outages?

PlanetLotus 7y ago
I'm not the parent, but I maintain services on both AWS and Azure, and in the last few years, I can definitely say the outages on Azure have been more frequent and more severe. The only AWS outages I recall are S3 and the Dyn DNS issue that brought many other providers down too.
- user5994461 7y ago
  The Dyn DNS outage was easier to explain. Half of the internet is down, it's not just AWS.
  - PlanetLotus 7y ago
    Exactly. As an AWS customer, that outage didn't really bother me because it was obvious it impacted many other unrelated services too.
cheeze 7y ago
I'd tell them "other providers have inevitable outages, however..." 1. The other providers have a better track record 2. The other providers don't go down globally multiple times a year