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Been an active user of Azure for almost five or six years now. Things were a lot more rough in then (especially if you'd seen the old portal), unlike what it is

by asabla 6y ago

Been an active user of Azure for almost five or six years now. Things were a lot more rough in then (especially if you'd seen the old portal), unlike what it is now. People always talk about cloud as an entity which can/shouldn't have problems at all. When it's more about convenience then anything else. So I wouldn't worry too much about this if I were you.

deathanatos 6y ago
I don't particularly expect the cloud to be problem free. I do expect it to be possible to, when an issue is caused by an outage or a service issue, get that escalated to actual engineers. That has not been easy, IMO. Even obvious stuff, like "we sent X request around Y time and got Z 500 Internal Server Error from service S" have required multiple round-trips.¹ Messaging around transient issues helps. E.g., AWS would often email us to tell us "hey, sorry, such & such VM is being hosed by the underlying hardware, it is migrating but you'll see a forced reboot". That's all I need to know: I expect some interruption to that portion of the system, and I expect to see it heal within a certain time frame, and if it does, great, no support ticket required. Azure sort of has that with "Resource health"; but, e.g., one of our recent support tickets is that we had a VM reboot unexpectedly due to a resource health event with its disks. And then, a few hours later, another VM, same resource health event, same issue, same reboot. And then again, a few hours later. And that pattern, with no further communication, requires me to write the (obvious) ticket of, "So… what's happening?" (That ticket ended with such and such service was experiencing an incident. Never made the status page. It did make the internal "Service alerts" page.) Part of issuing a PM is also to help show & convince me, the customer, that I won't be filing support issues for the rest of my life. But this last 6 months has just felt like support ticket after support ticket, and it's sort of depressing, since I'd rather be coding. I do think, last spring or so, it was no nearly this bad. ¹Every place I've worked at… we page on 5xx codes sent to a client. If Azure is internally doing that, it sure is hard to tell from where I sit.

by asabla 6y ago

deathanatos 6y ago

I don't particularly expect the cloud to be problem free. I do expect it to be possible to, when an issue is caused by an outage or a service issue, get that escalated to actual engineers. That has not been easy, IMO. Even obvious stuff, like "we sent X request around Y time and got Z 500 Internal Server Error from service S" have required multiple round-trips.¹ Messaging around transient issues helps. E.g., AWS would often email us to tell us "hey, sorry, such & such VM is being hosed by the underlying hardware, it is migrating but you'll see a forced reboot". That's all I need to know: I expect some interruption to that portion of the system, and I expect to see it heal within a certain time frame, and if it does, great, no support ticket required. Azure sort of has that with "Resource health"; but, e.g., one of our recent support tickets is that we had a VM reboot unexpectedly due to a resource health event with its disks. And then, a few hours later, another VM, same resource health event, same issue, same reboot. And then again, a few hours later. And that pattern, with no further communication, requires me to write the (obvious) ticket of, "So… what's happening?" (That ticket ended with such and such service was experiencing an incident. Never made the status page. It did make the internal "Service alerts" page.) Part of issuing a PM is also to help show & convince me, the customer, that I won't be filing support issues for the rest of my life. But this last 6 months has just felt like support ticket after support ticket, and it's sort of depressing, since I'd rather be coding. I do think, last spring or so, it was no nearly this bad. ¹Every place I've worked at… we page on 5xx codes sent to a client. If Azure is internally doing that, it sure is hard to tell from where I sit.