Cloud Outages

Last week Amazon's cloud-based infrastructure went down hard, knocking Netflix offline on what should have been one of its most heavily trafficked days of the year, starting Christmas Eve and running well into Christmas Day. This week it's Microsoft's turn to suffer a severe cloud outage. At 3:16 PM on December 28, Microsoft reported that its Azure Storage service for the South Central US region was experiencing "partial availability." In an update a few hours later on its service dashboard, the company noted that the outage was affecting its worldwide Management Portal. I'm not aware of any cloud-based service that offers a 100% uptime guarantee, because such a promise is impossible to keep. If you can afford redundant storage in multiple zones, that's a good alternative, but that option is too expensive for anything but mission-critical services. As more and more services move to the cloud, this sort of outage is inevitable (but hopefully rare). And on the part of customers, responding to it with equanimity and professionalism is essential.