Microsoft Azure Cloud - what is happening

"Yesterday's catastrophic Azure cloud failure is more concerning than most people realize.

Just two weeks after a majority of Windows machines broke due to CrowdStrike, Azure faced major networking issues. While outages, even among the big hyperscalers, are not entirely unexpected, the recent Azure outage reveals some serious underlying problems.

🤔 It is now clear that the Azure cloud is less reliable than many users had assumed.

If you look into Azure's history, this might not be as surprising. Microsoft began building Azure in October 2008, eight years after Amazon.com started building AWS. To catch up, many integral components were purchased from external vendors. One of these was the Software Defined Network (SDN) from Arista, which crumbled under pressure yesterday like a house of cards.

🚀 While cloud providers like AWS focused heavily on operational excellence and highly distributed computing under Werner Vogels, Azure aimed to scale quickly and be consumer-friendly.

But that rapid scaling came at a cost- resilience. By centralizing many infrastructure components, Azure introduced single points of failure, like weak links in a chain. And when one link breaks, the whole system collapses.

📖 The story doesn't end here.

There is no indication that these issues were caused by external cybercrime. However, the fact that they occurred just hours before the announcement of their quarterly financials leaves investors with many questions, much like a detective piecing together a mystery.

🚨 In response, I've received a flood of messages and seen several posts claiming the cloud is not secure.

But I'd like to flip the script: If the network infrastructure of a company like Microsoft- one that has spent billions of dollars and over a decade building it- can fail, we might need to reconsider whether the effort we're putting into operational excellence, resilience, and security by design is enough.

🏛️ The majority of our current IT landscape, including almost all public and critical infrastructure in the EU, such as governments, transportation, and energy, operates on far less resilient infrastructure.

If there's one lesson to take from this incident, it's that we need to shift our focus from sales promises and competitive pricing to taking responsibility for our infrastructure- following state-of-the-art practices for resilience and operational excellence.

🔧 As Werner Vogels famously said, Everything fails all the time. So, starting today, design for failure. It's not just a good idea- it's the only idea."

Author

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