Been having problems since about 1pm this afternoon (about 3 hours now), so this doesn't really surprise me.
'Azure appears to be full': UK punters complain of capacity issues on Microsoft's cloud
Customers of Microsoft's Azure cloud are reporting capacity issues such as the inability to create resources and associated reliability issues. Outage-tracking website Down Detector shows quite a few reports about UK Azure issues today, yet the official Azure Status page is all green ticks. The inability to provision resources …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 24th March 2020 16:59 GMT SecretSonOfHG
Who would have thought? Serverless things need to work ... servers!!!
A lot of people, even IT people, think that "serverless" is some kind of magic technology that spares you from having an actual server to execute things. Marketingspeak for "serverless" is "you don't need to pay for a server to execute this", but many people miss that part.
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 13:36 GMT Tim 11
Re: Invalid and Valid
From memory, Microsoft service agreements use some kind of weasel words to the effect that a service is only considered down if no part of the service is running at all. Couldn't log in to your email? but the login page appeared didn't it? so the service was up but just in a degraded state.
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Tuesday 24th March 2020 20:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Looks like i picked the wrong week to quit on prem.
While Teams is part of the issue, looking at the restrictions Microsoft are bringing into force for OneNote (read-only from within Teams), Sharepoint (file size restrictions, particularly for video) and Streams (size restrictions) it sounds like there are scalability issues with storage and session times.
I know that historically, MS had fairly tight file size limits due to web server timeouts so I guess its happening again?
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Tuesday 24th March 2020 22:45 GMT MatthewSt
Re: Looks like i picked the wrong week to quit on prem.
I think (haven't checked) that these are being brought in because these requests go _through_ the Teams infrastructure and then onto OneNote / SharePoint infrastructure, so accessing them through Teams causes more load than accessing them directly.
The capacity problem they're going to have is two-fold. One is the sheer number of extra users (they reckon 12 million / 30+% in a week) and the second is the increased usage by existing users. If you worked in a big office and used Teams for IM but had face to face meetings, you're now all doing video calls for the meetings.
I would imagine that the video quality issue is less down to the storage size and more down to the bandwidth and processing requirements. When you record a meeting through Teams (to save to Streams) it does some post-processing on it, so the video is normally available a while after the meeting has finished to give it time to finish rendering (and generate subtitles etc). Reducing the quality of this will mean that they don't need as much resources behind it. Personally I'd prefer to keep the quality and have the recording delayed (eg for our requirements it would be fine to have the recording available within 24 hours of the meeting rather than within 15 minutes)
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 13:51 GMT MatthewSt
Re: Looks like i picked the wrong week to quit on prem.
I've been remote for 10 years too, and while we've never _needed_ it, we find that it makes things easier. Unless you're able to make decisions with just two people, having video means you can tell if someone is looking like they want to say something (so you interrupt each other less). You can ask yes/no questions and not need everyone on the call to wait in turn to answer because you can see nodding and shaking heads. You can see if someone has forgotten to un-mute themselves rather than them having to work out for themselves why no one's responding to anything they're saying. You can see if they've had some other form of interruption without them having to say anything.
Do you have phone calls instead, or instant messaging or emails? Or are you lucky enough to not have to communicate as part of your day to day job? Different things work for different people and different teams, and this idea of "I don't like it so I don't see why anyone else would do it" seems defeatist in this day and age.
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 09:45 GMT colinb
Re: Looks like i picked the wrong week to quit on prem.
This is for starting VMs so maybe bandwidth but it needs to rehydrate the disks and find a slot on a host to run the VM.
Both are probably requisitioned for higher priorities and i'm sure the algo puts MS internal needs (Teams, O365 etc..) above anyone else including emergency services.
Would love to see that decision tree published.
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 13:18 GMT tiggity
Re: Cloud.
I think lots could have predicted this - plenty of novel viruses over the last few decades, we fortunately missed a lockdown bullet with plenty of them e.g. SARS not being as problematic as some feared, this time not so lucky.
But a lot of those sort of people are not in "decision making" positions as they tend to be castigated for being "negative" and do not rise the greasy pole (cautious risk assessments, considering near worst case scenarios (i.e. consider most bad possibilities but ignore the you're screwed regardless beyond Carrington event level possibilities) all mean raising concerns a lot of people do not want to hear)
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 06:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Cloud.
Cloudy stuff needs some CPU cycles somewhere to run
That means that it is just someone else's computer that you are using and...
Oh wait... A million other buisnesses want to use that same computer at the same time as me.
Time for a re-think about going all in on cloud perhaps?
{when the is all over naturally}
My working from home is not reliant on any this MS Collaboration stuff. My VM's are all on the server that sits in my Garage (very cool in there, 1C at the moment).
Just BAU as it has been since 2012 and as long as the phone/text/email works then I can
"Carry on and Keep Coding"
YMMV naturally.
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 08:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Homework
Ours are using Google classroom or whatever it's called. But you're right, it's difficult to be a parent and worker and child minder.
We just do what we can until the current crisis passes. At least there is a way for them to do some school work, it wouldn't have been possible when I was a child.
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 09:21 GMT Adrian Harvey
Re: Homework
When were you a child? In 1947 there was a Polio epidemic in New Zealand, and all the schools closed for a term (as well as no Cinemas, public meetings, etc). All the children were enrolled in Correspondence School, and the work posted out to them. One of the radio stations was co-opted and and certain lessons were broadcast at fixed times. So, for example Form 3 English might be 10-11 on Wednesdays.
I’m sure the latest tech has made it a little easier, and more interactive, but it has been *possible* for a very long time.
Icon because it’s a teacher... and because I’m being pedantic about the word possible so I can tell my anecdote :-)
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 15:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Homework
Adrian gets an upvote for his comment on my comment as I hadn't heard of that before.
The only thing which occurred to me is that according to my parents TV wasn't very prevalent in 1947, at least in the UK.
Now that you mention it I can remember various schools programs on in the 70s and of course I'm aware of the OU.... but getting that kind of thing up and running across a country, for primary and secondary schools in a matter of days would have been a challenge in 70s Britain in my opinion.
What's nice now is that some teachers are doing "conf call" teaching to top up the other services. It's nice for the kids to be able to see their classmates and teachers.
...and the good news is that so far I haven't had to kill any of my children :-)
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 16:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Homework
They have actually got school lessons up on Spanish TV in a week.
It looks like they used some of their own children's TV programs and did a deal with some educational YouTube channels and restructured them a bit, but it's enough for the short term.
Also in the 80s there were Programmes for Schools on British TV. I wonder if they'll dust them off soon.
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 11:23 GMT NightFox
Re: Homework
Schools are damned if they do, damned if they don't. They have a remit to try to continue education to the highest standard they can, given the circumstances. If some home environments can't (or won't) accommodate that, then so be it, those families should do what they can.
People need to accept that there's no perfect solution to any of the challenges thrown up by Covid-19, everything's a balanced compromise. So pointing out and moaning about the obvious downsides in any solution doesn't really help at all (not a dig, just a general observation).
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 12:10 GMT DreamEater
Re: Homework
My child is 7, I feel that a term, or maybe two will be fine for him to "miss", he will still do work at home, but no where near the level the school is pumping it out at.
I know we're asked to stay in, but we're also encouraged to be out exercising, so in our once a day opportunity to leave the house, we'll most likely do some "exploring" of the local woods and countryside, he will learn a lot of things that can't be taught in the classroom, which I feel can only be a good thing.
Unfortunately I don't know what the end result will be, I can only do what I think is best for our mental and physical health at this time, being stressed out about work, school and caring all at the same time can't be good.
[/2cents]
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 08:45 GMT localzuk
Interesting
How Microsoft seem to be the only cloud provider struggling. Not heard of AWS or Google struggling to scale.
Even down to their productivity suite, I've seen no end of issues with people on Office 365 - Teams being a big issue. Those people using G Suite don't seem to have faced any of those sorts of issues.
A consequence of Microsoft leveraging legacy systems (Exchange, Sharepoint etc...) with fancy modern skins, vs from the ground up built solutions at Google?
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Thursday 26th March 2020 19:28 GMT theblackhand
Re: Interesting
Intels q4 server CPU sales were off the charts - up around 49%
I know Nvidia contributed a chunk of that with their Geforce Now DC's, but hadn't hard which of the other big cloud providers took the rest.
AWS/Azure/Google had all been delaying spending waiting for new chips, any evidence that it was AWS that won?
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Wednesday 25th March 2020 16:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Blog post from Microsoft
tl;dr - they're prioritising health organisations