6 ms·

AWS outage and the world is in a panic. Azure outage and ... crickets?

echelon 5y ago
A few interpretations: - Folks on Azure are active-active in multiple availability zones - Most of those using Azure are not impacted by this particular outage - Azure isn't widely used ...
- jhugo 5y ago
  > Folks on Azure are active-active in multiple availability zones Why would people on Azure be more likely than people on AWS to have redundancy? Anyway, in the recent AWS outages, multiple AZs didn't help much. Needed to be in multiple regions.
  - macksd 5y ago
    In my experience, a higher portion of Azure customers are larger enterprise customers that engage professional services from Microsoft to architect things, etc. AWS is far more popular in general, but especially with smaller teams that are more self-directed, start with prototypes and iterate from there. It wouldn't surprise my if the latter often only built in redundancy after learning lessons the hard way, even though AWS provides the ability to do so from the get go. Purely conjecture, but that skew in the customer type is definitely there.
  - bfung 5y ago
    Before “the cloud”, it was already common to run Active Directory installs as active-active in on- prem scenarios, since those installs would’ve hit outages pretty early after installing AD. Maybe not across data center regions, but AD admins learn real quick to have redundancy and backups. Porting over to Azure AD probably wasn’t such an issue then, as most firms would lift&shift their on-prem to the cloud, keeping the same configurations.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    This is what I didnt get about the multi-AZ claims. If you're in multiple zones within the same region when that region goes down, you're still going down too. Yet, this seems to be the agreed upon solution decreed far & wide.
    - cdegroot 5y ago
      It helps. It's not a silver bullet. AZs tend to go down more often than whole regions, is the belief (I don't think there's sufficient data, but a priori it does make sense).
- bob1029 5y ago
  We are on Azure but no one was working when this hit and we don't host any critical workloads so its not a big deal for us this time. AWS and GitHub seem to crater right when everyone is using them the most (i.e. 10am EST on a Tuesday), so there is bound to be far more discussion around these occurrences since everyone is wired on coffee, ass-in-chair, frustrated that they can't get any work done. People usually don't get out of bed and then get on the internet to complain about a transient outage that occurred while they were asleep.
- nirushiv 5y ago
  - People are at home after work?
  - logosmonkey 5y ago
    This is probably the correct answer. We run a lot of stuff at work on AAD but I don't care, it's 10:45p EST. If I were on our infra team I might care a bit, mostly monitoring to verify it would be up before users start trying to log on tomorrow but otherwise, meh.
- thedougd 5y ago
  I'd wager that Azure customers tend to run classic workloads as VMs. Those workloads are usually not impacted by API outages. When AWS has API outages, all those Lambdas, autoscaling groups, subscribers to queues and topics, etc have a very bad day.
itsdrewmiller 5y ago
This isn't taking down Azure workloads, just the ability to log into their portal. AWS's recent outages were both much more impactful to customers.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  And even then, only if you happen to lose the lottery and hit a backend that was affected. This wasn't AAD-wide.
msbarnett 5y ago
The only thing that’s down is Azure Active Directory. If you’re not using that product, everything is working fine. This is more like Amazon’s IAM product being down than AWS as a whole.
- simlevesque 5y ago
  Amazon IAM being down brings down 95% of AWS.
  - chupasaurus 5y ago
    Also including the status website IIRC
- emilsedgh 5y ago
  This has brought down Outlook as well, which as far as I understand is the most important offering of Microsoft's cloud services nowadays.
  - msbarnett 5y ago
    Probably their most important consumer and b2b off the shelf cloud service, yeah, but when people talk about Azure I presume they mean more like, the compute, database, hosted kubernetes etc products. Most of which people run Linux on and tend(?) not to integrate with ActiveDirectory, broadly.
- ameliaquining 5y ago
  Doesn't pretty much everything depend on IAM to know what it's allowed to do? I suppose if you had stuff already running then it might be able to keep going on cached authorizations, but that still sounds likely to cause a lot of problems.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    The comparison wasn't very good. You can have access control in Azure without AAD.
whateveracct 5y ago
exactly lmao
nunez 5y ago
In my limited experience working with Azure, parts of it, including AAD, go down way more often than AWS. Also, very large swaths of the Internet run on AWS directly or indirectly, so it makes sense that it would be larger news.

A few interpretations: - Folks on Azure are active-active in multiple availability zones - Most of those using Azure are not impacted by this particular outage - Azure isn't widely used ...

jhugo 5y ago
> Folks on Azure are active-active in multiple availability zones Why would people on Azure be more likely than people on AWS to have redundancy? Anyway, in the recent AWS outages, multiple AZs didn't help much. Needed to be in multiple regions.
- macksd 5y ago
  In my experience, a higher portion of Azure customers are larger enterprise customers that engage professional services from Microsoft to architect things, etc. AWS is far more popular in general, but especially with smaller teams that are more self-directed, start with prototypes and iterate from there. It wouldn't surprise my if the latter often only built in redundancy after learning lessons the hard way, even though AWS provides the ability to do so from the get go. Purely conjecture, but that skew in the customer type is definitely there.
- bfung 5y ago
  Before “the cloud”, it was already common to run Active Directory installs as active-active in on- prem scenarios, since those installs would’ve hit outages pretty early after installing AD. Maybe not across data center regions, but AD admins learn real quick to have redundancy and backups. Porting over to Azure AD probably wasn’t such an issue then, as most firms would lift&shift their on-prem to the cloud, keeping the same configurations.
- dylan604 5y ago
  This is what I didnt get about the multi-AZ claims. If you're in multiple zones within the same region when that region goes down, you're still going down too. Yet, this seems to be the agreed upon solution decreed far & wide.
  - cdegroot 5y ago
    It helps. It's not a silver bullet. AZs tend to go down more often than whole regions, is the belief (I don't think there's sufficient data, but a priori it does make sense).
bob1029 5y ago
We are on Azure but no one was working when this hit and we don't host any critical workloads so its not a big deal for us this time. AWS and GitHub seem to crater right when everyone is using them the most (i.e. 10am EST on a Tuesday), so there is bound to be far more discussion around these occurrences since everyone is wired on coffee, ass-in-chair, frustrated that they can't get any work done. People usually don't get out of bed and then get on the internet to complain about a transient outage that occurred while they were asleep.
nirushiv 5y ago
- People are at home after work?
- logosmonkey 5y ago
  This is probably the correct answer. We run a lot of stuff at work on AAD but I don't care, it's 10:45p EST. If I were on our infra team I might care a bit, mostly monitoring to verify it would be up before users start trying to log on tomorrow but otherwise, meh.
thedougd 5y ago
I'd wager that Azure customers tend to run classic workloads as VMs. Those workloads are usually not impacted by API outages. When AWS has API outages, all those Lambdas, autoscaling groups, subscribers to queues and topics, etc have a very bad day.

itsdrewmiller 5y ago

This isn't taking down Azure workloads, just the ability to log into their portal. AWS's recent outages were both much more impactful to customers.

Godel_unicode 5y ago
And even then, only if you happen to lose the lottery and hit a backend that was affected. This wasn't AAD-wide.

msbarnett 5y ago

The only thing that’s down is Azure Active Directory. If you’re not using that product, everything is working fine. This is more like Amazon’s IAM product being down than AWS as a whole.

simlevesque 5y ago
Amazon IAM being down brings down 95% of AWS.
- chupasaurus 5y ago
  Also including the status website IIRC
emilsedgh 5y ago
This has brought down Outlook as well, which as far as I understand is the most important offering of Microsoft's cloud services nowadays.
- msbarnett 5y ago
  Probably their most important consumer and b2b off the shelf cloud service, yeah, but when people talk about Azure I presume they mean more like, the compute, database, hosted kubernetes etc products. Most of which people run Linux on and tend(?) not to integrate with ActiveDirectory, broadly.
ameliaquining 5y ago
Doesn't pretty much everything depend on IAM to know what it's allowed to do? I suppose if you had stuff already running then it might be able to keep going on cached authorizations, but that still sounds likely to cause a lot of problems.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  The comparison wasn't very good. You can have access control in Azure without AAD.

whateveracct 5y ago

exactly lmao

nunez 5y ago

In my limited experience working with Azure, parts of it, including AAD, go down way more often than AWS. Also, very large swaths of the Internet run on AWS directly or indirectly, so it makes sense that it would be larger news.