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Does anyone use Azure for a production service? I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts ...

• alpb 14y ago
  iCloud is hosted on Azure Storage.
  • niggler 14y ago
    I initially thought you were joking, but it appears that iCloud is hosted on Azure and Amazon Services: http://www.redmondpie.com/guess-what-icloud-uses-windows-azure-services-for-hosting-data/ http://www.redmondpie.com/guess-what-icloud-uses-windows-azu...
• jborden13 14y ago
  Yes overall the service has been good for us. We are mostly down, with a few services partially up but throwing errors and causing more confusion. Now we are just sitting on our hands getting pelted by clients...
  • niggler 14y ago
    "Now we are just sitting on our hands getting pelted by clients..." You don't have a backup plan?
    • jborden13 14y ago
      We do for our apps and database, but not for our blob storage & caching.
• jspaur 14y ago
  We use Azure pretty seriously and overall, we really like it. We went with the MSFT stack due to some of our low level code to deal with printing. That being said, it's had it's share of outages, but honestly no less than if we were racking and stacking our own machines. The most frustrating thing though (with any cloud provider really) is that if it goes down all you can do is sit and wait...atleast if its our fault we feel like we're in control.
  • niggler 14y ago
    " it's had it's share of outages" Do you just sit on your hands when that happens? Do you have a failure plan?
    • jspaur 14y ago
      We do have a failure plan (and ironically enough were actively working on improving storage resiliency, this just hit us before we were able to deploy it) That being said, there unfortunately is always a level 'sitting on hands' in events like this. If you're in dev you rely on your operations people (and vicea versa). You put your best people on it and continue to go on the best you can. All that being said, a fired rill just for the sake of doing something may cause more harm than good. If a rollover plan takes 2 hours (switch DNS, migrate data, test, stabilize, etc.) a) often times that'll take longer than the original issue requires to be resolved and b) you'll run into new issues in your new location (maybe environmental, maybe not)
    • tarekayna 14y ago
      You seem to be asking more than one person about failure plans. What kind of a failure plan do you have in mind? For something as big as this (many azure services are completely down)
      • niggler 14y ago
        I generally worry about outsourcing a critical part of a business to one vendor without a plan for what happens if they go down. I'd ask the same question if people said they used AWS.
        • tarekayna 14y ago
          I agree to the general concept. I'm just curious about how you would handle it. Would you use AWS as backup to Azure and switch DNS when this happens? Anyone else is welcome to pitch in here, I'm new to native cloud applications and find myself just waiting in this case.
• photorized 14y ago
  We do, for some of our infrastructure at www.itrendcorporation.com. We use Azure Websites, Azure Storage, Azure SQL. Websites has been great. SQL East had a major (I mean, complete 100% outage for more than 5 hours) outage, so we are now making some changes internally. I like Azure, but I don't think I am ready to use it in production for anything critical without another standby infrastructure in place.
  • niggler 14y ago
    "I like Azure, but I don't think I am ready to use it in production for anything critical without another standby infrastructure in place." Seems like a really good general rule for any service :)
• 727374 14y ago
  We're using it for a bigish platform (10mm monthly uniques). PAAS Deployment is really nice. Also, knowing servers will be automatically patched in a timely manner is awesome. Support was very good but I've heard it's going downhill. SQL Azure is underpowered but highly durable and manages itself. If we really needed to scale up SQL the federations feature would work well. We've only had one brief SQL Azure outage in the last 2 yrs. We also have a DR site on AWS. AWS has a lot more bells and whistles and also had a nice head start. E.G. low-tech conveniences like sticky sessions on a load balancers or IP whitelisting on a variety of services are missing in Azure. Both services have had outages and we wouldn't feel safe using one exclusively.
  • niggler 14y ago
    How do you handle DNS (is it hosted on Azure/AWS or elsewhere)?