Updated March 13, 2023
Introduction to Azure Outage
Primarily, Microsoft Azure is known to be a cloud computing service to figure out, test, organize and accomplish applications and services by means of Microsoft-managed data centers. While the software will always possess bugs, so no cloud platform available can deliver no outages. Microsoft is continuously making efforts to prevent any risks or issues from happening in the future and provide swift recoveries with transparency. Microsoft Azure has received a number of reports over the past hours by the time of day, issuing a few problems. Generally, an outage is identified when the number of reports represents a greater value than the baseline fixed. The customers have to face a global outage of Azure using Windows virtual machine plus services which are reliant on them provided by Microsoft including some other services for a period of 8 hours occurred on Oct 13.
What is Used to Provide Outage?
- Azure Service Health informs the admin about Azure service incidents plus scheduled maintenance accordingly; the admin can perform an action to diminish downtime.
- Even one can design customizable cloud alerts and implement their personalized dashboard to analyze the health issues occurrences, observe the effect on the cloud assets, receive supervision and maintenance, and distribute facts and updates comprising the event root cause evaluation.
- One can get Azure Health status by downloading authorized reports from Microsoft, following real-time events on mobile devices, and any problem management system with tenacious links.
- Azure service health dashboard helps you to find out any outage to the Azure cloud services and guidance to deal with it having proper solutions and protection against any alerts or attacks.
- Microsoft finances over USD 1 billion for improved security on the cyber security cloud research and development. Nearly 3500 number of security experts is engaged to entirely focus on safeguarding users’ data and privacy.
- Azure holds a maximum number of certifications compared to any other cloud provider. So, create your Azure account now using the Azure portal and go through it via complete guided and planned documentation material.
Types of Outage in the Future
Over the previous months, Microsoft Azure experienced two kinds of outages and worked to avoid these outages in the future.
1. Azure AD (Active Directory) Outage – March 2021
- We might consider the cloud to be a magic pulp that possesses together or mobile apps, email access, and the validation of users for business infrastructure where it does not break computing. But an Azure outage on March 15 controlled to prevalent outages on the second major cloud computing platform. As a result, it hampered the Azure services and Teams, Dynamics 365, Office, Xbox Live & so on.
- The 14-hour outage happened approximately when a key rotation of security, which is better to maintain users safe for Azure Active Directory, was executed. At the same day, Microsoft was acting a difficult data migration concerning the cloud providers. As a result, it marked a particular key named as “don’t rotate,” which is required to stay for the period being to accomplish the migration. However, this marking “don’t rotate” was unnoticed by the spontaneous rotation process; for instance, new keys extended Azure services, consumers could not log in.
2. Azure DNS Outage – April 2021
- A small outage was monitored on April 1, when the Azure DNS began to practice an obtainability issue that produced failures in retrieving and organizing Azure services through different regions for several customers.
- It was thought to play off as the world’s slightest comic April Fools’ Day joke; however, it was truly triggered by Azure DNS servers suffering a flow in DNS queries aiming at a set of domains introduced on Azure. Unfortunately, the structure of events unprotected a code defect in the DNS service, which directed to an excess in the service and a reduction in accessibility.
- Conferring to Microsoft, these DNS services habitually recuperated themselves and recovery period “exceeding {Microsoft’s} design goal.” Also, Microsoft intelligences its previously functioning on restoring the code defect and enhancing spontaneous confinement and moderation of unfamiliar traffic.
Azure DNS Outage Status
- Just about 2 weeks after the Azure AD Outage happened in March, Microsoft practiced an unadorned DNS outage on April 1st, 2021, Thursday evening at nearly 21:30 UTC. This was the official start from Microsoft of the outage. However, the definite and official starts may be frequently distinct.
- Exoprise DNS and the server was observing caught the error nearly 10 min former nevertheless this is regularly the nature of DNS failures. You need to learn a lesson from this outage that DNS failures may offend and also hurt bad. There raises a problem when the web status page does not work or even the alternate one. Within a short time, at Microsoft, someone started to receive the picture, which was a static page having a message for a way to go, and then they modified the status page plus published it simultaneously.
- Also, the Exoprise Integrated Twitter with status feeds providing a semblance of info about the issue and a message that Microsoft is looking after the issue or outage occurred and will update as soon as possible.
- It was investigated that the Microsoft Azure DNS outage’s preliminary root cause was not clear, but Microsoft DNS servers noticed a spike present in DNS traffic on April 2. So, Microsoft apologized for the effect produced by the DNS outage, and the team is continuing to examine to find the complete root cause of this DNS outage.
Custom Dashboard
- Custom Dashboard of Azure is beneficial to receive personalized alerts plus guidance in regard to the Azure service outages or issues.
- The dashboard provides configuration options for cloud alerts to inform the users about active or forthcoming service issues; also shareable facts with updates containing the enquiry of incident root cause and even offers support and maintenance.
- Azure’s customizable and configurable dashboards deliver the admin and the teams with the feature of tractability for partaking info, observing progress and developments, and enhancing your workflow procedures. In addition, every team can modify their dashboards for reviewing of ongoing processes.
- This dashboard is a collaborative signboards type that offers real-time figures connected with a project team screening charts and widgets.
- After configuring the dashboard, you can access quick links as well as other functions.
Conclusion – Azure Outage
Azure delivers SaaS (Software as a service), PaaS (Platform as a service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), also supporting various programming languages, frameworks, and tools consisting of both Microsoft-specific plus third-party software and systems. Azure outages are unpredicted things that came out, giving problems to customers, but Microsoft and the team are applying extra protections to prevent a class of risks to the backend safe development process system, i.e., SDP, in the coming future.
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