Microsoft’s Azure cloud outage that happened this week was the latest but won’t be the last cloud service to affect customers. It does point to the scale of risk of being in the cloud game.
Industry Reactions:
1) The question for those who must keep Azure up is can they deliver against the pace of technology change that they are committed to.
2) Ed Ansett, founder of i3 Solutions Group which has developed a Service Line Architecture model pointed to the fact that CIOs accept there is an associated loss of control when adopting cloud services.
3) Speaking at the DatacenterDynamics Converged event in London on the day the outage was happening one speaker said: "There are no gods in data centre design and architecture, even at the cloud scale."
4) Outages happen and it is a question of mitigating those events.
5) BMC.com re-animated a 6 point guide which went as follows:
i: Everybody has outages.
ii: They are survivable. While everyone has outages, those outages don’t have to take down your application. It all comes down to application architecture. If you expect and anticipate that cloud failures will occur, you will architect your applications to use redundancy and data replication so that they can continue to operate in the face of outages.
iii: This too, shall pass.
iv: Identify your detection mechanism.
v: Ensure you have a reliable communication channel.
vi: Management tools can help.
Microsoft has posted a blog explaining what happened.
Cloud outages are a fact of life.
