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It was less than a month ago and, with us starting our migration to Azure which is due to complete by mid-June, I'm getting decidedly jumpy about the amount of

It was less than a month ago and, with us starting our migration to Azure which is due to complete by mid-June, I'm getting decidedly jumpy about the amount of downtime. Our current provider, with whom we have a number of dedicated servers, might be piss poor in some ways (takes ages to get changes made, lack of pricing transparency, kind of expensive for what they are), but I don't remember the last time they had an outage. There's definitely been one in the last year, but two in the space of a month is ridiculous. Is this normal for Azure? Is AWS any better?

cmpb 6y ago
We’ve been with Azure for two years. This scale of an issue is definitely abnormal, but other minor outages (typically geo-specific) are more frequent, which is why we do have some things using their “paired regions” geo-redundancy mechanisms.
abarringer 6y ago
What I truly don't get is everyone compares piss poor on-prem servers with premium cloud offerings. Sure, you can screw up on prem. But if you are only marginally competent spinning up services/servers/clusters takes but an instant, it's dirt cheap, and vastly more reliable. Our only significant outages in the past 10 years have been our services dependent on big clouds. Including the Pre-Thanksgiving AWS one last year. AWS outage history here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Services#Amazon_Web_Services_outages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  > Sure, you can screw up on prem. But if you are only marginally competent spinning up services/servers/clusters takes but an instant, it's dirt cheap, and vastly more reliable. Do you mean on premise you can spin up virtual servers and virtual clusters instantly? Because I imagine you'd have to order, physically rack, and setup the bare metal if one doesn't have the capacity already.
  - iJohnDoe 6y ago
    Exactly. Sure, my cousin Earl can spin up a container and some VMs. Will they be secure? Probably not. Will they be backed up and offsite failover? Probably not. Will they get ransomware at some point? Probably. There is no need to make blanket statements about on-prem vs. cloud. You have to weigh the pros and cons as any other business decision. It’s about controlling you’re own destiny with either decision.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      Not trying to make blanket statements. I'm actually a fan of on prem when load and reliability needs fit.
      - petre 6y ago
        You can use Proxmox. We have an on prem cluster. It works reliably as long as your hardware works. It does LXC, VMs, migrations to another node, snasphots, ZFS. We hand an outage when a router died. Surprisingly a bare metal FreeBSD server directly connected to the public network was still up when the VMs were unacessible.
  - russellendicott 6y ago
    Yeah. I used to work for a mid sized company and they did a lot of on-prem. Even there it took a lot of lead time to add 20 physical nodes to a cluster. Now I work for an Global Enterprise and the benefits of cloud aren't necessarily about reliability--they're more about the speed and efficiency that pet projects can be spun up and spun down without international labor laws and multi-year leases.

cmpb 6y ago

We’ve been with Azure for two years. This scale of an issue is definitely abnormal, but other minor outages (typically geo-specific) are more frequent, which is why we do have some things using their “paired regions” geo-redundancy mechanisms.

abarringer 6y ago

What I truly don't get is everyone compares piss poor on-prem servers with premium cloud offerings. Sure, you can screw up on prem. But if you are only marginally competent spinning up services/servers/clusters takes but an instant, it's dirt cheap, and vastly more reliable. Our only significant outages in the past 10 years have been our services dependent on big clouds. Including the Pre-Thanksgiving AWS one last year. AWS outage history here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Services#Amazon_Web_Services_outages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...

paulryanrogers 6y ago
> Sure, you can screw up on prem. But if you are only marginally competent spinning up services/servers/clusters takes but an instant, it's dirt cheap, and vastly more reliable. Do you mean on premise you can spin up virtual servers and virtual clusters instantly? Because I imagine you'd have to order, physically rack, and setup the bare metal if one doesn't have the capacity already.
- iJohnDoe 6y ago
  Exactly. Sure, my cousin Earl can spin up a container and some VMs. Will they be secure? Probably not. Will they be backed up and offsite failover? Probably not. Will they get ransomware at some point? Probably. There is no need to make blanket statements about on-prem vs. cloud. You have to weigh the pros and cons as any other business decision. It’s about controlling you’re own destiny with either decision.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Not trying to make blanket statements. I'm actually a fan of on prem when load and reliability needs fit.
    - petre 6y ago
      You can use Proxmox. We have an on prem cluster. It works reliably as long as your hardware works. It does LXC, VMs, migrations to another node, snasphots, ZFS. We hand an outage when a router died. Surprisingly a bare metal FreeBSD server directly connected to the public network was still up when the VMs were unacessible.
- russellendicott 6y ago
  Yeah. I used to work for a mid sized company and they did a lot of on-prem. Even there it took a lot of lead time to add 20 physical nodes to a cluster. Now I work for an Global Enterprise and the benefits of cloud aren't necessarily about reliability--they're more about the speed and efficiency that pet projects can be spun up and spun down without international labor laws and multi-year leases.