Microsoft has offered an explanation for the Windows Azure service disruption that affected a subset of users: a software bug.
Microsoft has offered an explanation for the Windows Azure
service disruption that plagued some users Feb. 28: The Leap Year did it.
The issue was quickly triaged, and it was determined to be
caused by a software bug, Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Microsofts
Server and Cloud, wrote in a Feb. 29 posting on the
Windows
Azure Team Blog. While final root-cause analysis is in progress, this
issue appears to be due to a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap
year.
Following that diagnosis, Windows Azure engineers created a
workaround, while still dealing with issues affecting some sub-regions and
customers. According to the
Windows
Azure Service Dashboard, virtually all regions were up and running by March
1, with the exception of an alert for the Windows Azure Compute in the
South-Central U.S. region; that alert, posted the morning of Feb. 29, suggested
some issue with incoming traffic.
Windows Azure is a major pillar of Microsofts increasingly
robust cloud efforts. In addition to selling big companies on cloud-based
services such as Azure and Office 365, Microsoft has also turned its attention
to smaller concerns: recently, it announced a partnership with TechStars to
offer $60,000 in cloud services to startups.
Tech startups around the world are building products and
services in the cloud, Himanshu Singh, a senior product manager on the Windows
Azure marketing team, wrote in a Jan. 30
corporate
blog posting. Cloud applications and smart devices are driving the new
startup ecosystem, affording startups the ability to drive user adoption, scale
their company and generate financial returns with far less capital at a faster
pace than ever before.
Microsoft also recently announced a series of updates to
Windows Azure designed to help developers build on the platform, including new
open-source capabilities, SQL Azure database enhancements and a streamlined
billing and management system. On top of that, Microsoft pushed out a
significant update to the Windows Azure Plug-In for Eclipse with Java, in
addition to support for other open-source platforms, including MongoDB,
Memcached, Apache Soir and Lucene.
All cloud services inevitably experience some downtime. So
far, that hasnt dissuaded a healthy percentage of businesses from at least
considering the cloud for their productivity efforts.
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