An Azure Outage

  • Bottom line is that we need more choices regarding cloud computing and service vendors. I want to see more competition where distinctions based on customer service, reliability and honesty are more clear.

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor (3/14/2012)


    If you read the update and root cause analysis, this wasn't a redundancy issue. It was caused by a software bug, one that couldn't be fixed by more hardware. Developers had to build a fix, test it, and deploy it.

    All that tells me is that this critical system software wasn't tested properly in the first place. One of the first tests you should run on any piece of software that relies on a date is to test it still works on leap days, since those are the obvious exceptions in the calendar that are likely to throw things out of kilter. Imagine what would happen if the non-cloud version of SQL Server crashed when it tried to process a date on a leap day, for example--I doubt anyone would be especially impressed with that!

  • TravisDBA (3/14/2012)


    There is a reason we study history.

    Dave

    True Dave, but most people don't study it two weeks after it happened. Enough time has not gone by yet for the whole story to come out.:-D

    Not what I meant.

    The cloud is not new. It is just a rebranding of things offered years ago. When I refer to history I mean that which is more than 10 days old, more like years old.

    My biggest complaint is that managers comment about how hosting your data has the same risks as keeping it in house. I strongly disagree.

    Data kept in house is at risk. Employees can access things they should not, and people can try to access it externally as well. It all comes down to how your security is handled.

    Data kept with an external hosting company is at risk the same as in house, PLUS the additional risk of another company's infrastructure not being secure. No matter how good they are, having data hosted by someone else will always increase your risk, and can never decrease it.

    Dave

  • Data kept in house is at risk. Employees can access things they should not, and people can try to access it externally as well. It all comes down to how your security is handled.

    Data kept with an external hosting company is at risk the same as in house, PLUS the additional risk of another company's infrastructure not being secure. No matter how good they are, having data hosted by someone else will always increase your risk, and can never decrease it.

    Yes, I do totally agree with both of those above things. There are risks on both sides of the aisle here either way you go. My point is, until all the facts are out on this, I am reserving judgement on either.:-D

    "Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"

  • First, I think Steve is spot on with his last sentence. There is a truism that says, 'When you buy something, buy from a throat you can put your hands around'.

    I am with a 'cloud' vendor. We work very hard to make our throats visible and available. As painful as it may sometimes be at 'Oh Dark Thirty', the IT equivilent of 'You'll be fine. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning' seems to comfort the customer.

    But that's just me.

  • Come on Guys. Everybody is being so sympathetic to Microsoft. This was simply sloppy Date Arithmetic. We're 12 years into the 21st Century and we're still having problems with Dates.

    Other Database Engines that I work with sorted out Dates in time for Y2K. Microsoft took until SQL Server 2008 to introduce Date as a Data Type.

    And yes I have created outages due to my own mistakes. I do believe that 8 hours is a huge length of time for a software caused outage. Where was the Rollback Plan ?

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