Azure Outage... Again
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@tonyshowoff said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
@tonyshowoff said in Azure Outage... Again:
Why are all of Microsoft's failures colossal ones, such as the whole IMAP situation recently? They seem to take an inordinate amount of time to fix as well.
Partially because they only make colossal systems.
Naturally, but it doesn't seem as though even larger systems have as much in the way of outages. Not to brag, we aren't nearly as big, but we haven't gone down once since 2007. I bet I've jinxed myself.
Oh granted, MS is not on top of these things like their competitors. They are "good" (mostly, not Azure, they couldn't cloud their way out of a plastic bag these days) but they are not "great." They clearly have zero capability to play with the Amazons and Googles of the world.
Partly, and this is huge, MS is a software firm, not an IT one. Running large scale IT is as foreign to them as it is to any random large scale company. And they are hampered by needing to run a lot of it on Windows and Hyper-V which are obviously not the best choices in many cases. Amazon and Google, for example, choose other platforms for a reason. Microsoft has an "eat their own dogfood" problem that limits their choices significantly and limits them to using technology that no other major player would even consider.
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I'm going to curse myself as well, but I've had Exchange for 5+ years now, and Domino for 12 years before that and never a full out failure other either hardware or software.
This isn't normal, though. I've worked in many a shop with massive budgets and huge teams and their Exchange and similar systems failed far, far more often than Microsoft does.
And you are talking Exchange, we are not. We are talking Azure. MS Hosted Exchange I've barely seen blip, it's way more stable than any on premises / in house I've ever seen. It's Azure that they can't run to save themselves. If you can run a cloud the size of Azure in house without a failure, let me know.
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It's weird... It seems the more complex your system is, multiple DAGs, and the other components, the more likely there will be problems. The other company I constantly mention, their Exchange infrastructure is (or at least a few years ago, was) was constantly crumbling.
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@Dashrender said in Azure Outage... Again:
It's weird... It seems the more complex your system is, multiple DAGs, and the other components, the more likely there will be problems. The other company I constantly mention, their Exchange infrastructure is (or at least a few years ago, was) was constantly crumbling.
That's a HUGE factor in any HA discussion. HA systems bring their own risks. At some point they introduce more risk than they mitigate.
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@Dashrender said in Azure Outage... Again:
It's weird... It seems the more complex your system is, multiple DAGs, and the other components, the more likely there will be problems. The other company I constantly mention, their Exchange infrastructure is (or at least a few years ago, was) was constantly crumbling.
This is a common view point, the more complex a system is, the harder it is to manage and the more likely there will be a failure. The Saturn V rocket was so complex they could expect at least 600+ parts to fail during any launch, or maybe it was 6,000, well it was a lot and that is pretty frightening. That's why we need to keep things as simple as possible. However, there is a train off, simple systems don't scale worth a damn. Keep it as simple as you can with what you have.
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@tonyshowoff said in Azure Outage... Again:
@Dashrender said in Azure Outage... Again:
It's weird... It seems the more complex your system is, multiple DAGs, and the other components, the more likely there will be problems. The other company I constantly mention, their Exchange infrastructure is (or at least a few years ago, was) was constantly crumbling.
This is a common view point, the more complex a system is, the harder it is to manage and the more likely there will be a failure. The Saturn V rocket was so complex they could expect at least 600+ parts to fail during any launch, or maybe it was 6,000, well it was a lot and that is pretty frightening. That's why we need to keep things as simple as possible. However, there is a train off, simple systems don't scale worth a damn. Keep it as simple as you can with what you have.
The Saturn V was so complex that even NASA and the USAF lack the knowledge, ability and information to build them today. Yes, the US has actually moved backwards in rocket technology (for that size and type of rocket) and can't do today what we could do forty years ago. A bit crazy. It's one of the biggest "lost knowledge" items in the last century.
Much like how the Romans knew more about making hydrolic cement two thousand years ago than we know today.
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@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
Much like how the Romans knew more about making hydrolic cement two thousand years ago than we know today.
I agree with you, but I try to avoid stating things in that way, because it helps reinforce that "ancient knowledge" garbage that's out there, like "they could do things we couldn't do, therefore here's an insane conclusion about how they had magic/aliens/electricity/etc or were better than us and we don't know anything, p.s. here's more new age garbage." The same thing happens with the Pyramids as well, and it's often not that we can't do it, we just don't know how they did it, but we may figure out eventually.
Additionally, their approaches were often radically different, again the Pyramids, we couldn't build them that way today not just because we're not absolutely sure how they did, but even if we knew, dealing with concrete is easier than giant stones, so our building infrastructure is based around that, as opposed to oxen pulling sleds or whatever. Going way back to the 60s it was claimed "our cranes cannot lift the stones in Egypt, therefore aliens," of course they didn't use our cranes so that's not even important.
That was slightly off topic, but I think it does also show another lesson about how approaches can be so different that building something with them, even in software or whatever, cannot be done the same way just because it's all so functionally different from the bottom up.
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@tonyshowoff said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
Much like how the Romans knew more about making hydrolic cement two thousand years ago than we know today.
I agree with you, but I try to avoid stating things in that way, because it helps reinforce that "ancient knowledge" garbage that's out there, like "they could do things we couldn't do, therefore here's an insane conclusion about how they had magic/aliens/electricity/etc or were better than us and we don't know anything, p.s. here's more new age garbage." The same thing happens with the Pyramids as well, and it's often not that we can't do it, we just don't know how they did it, but we may figure out eventually.
More it's "we just don't care as much as they did and we've not advanced far enough yet to have rendered it trivial."
Like "could we build the pyramids today"? Heck yeah we could. But the real estate costs today, the lack of slave labour, the unions, the democracy, the insurance, the upkeep, the zoning and permits... it's just not worth it.
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@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
@tonyshowoff said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
Much like how the Romans knew more about making hydrolic cement two thousand years ago than we know today.
I agree with you, but I try to avoid stating things in that way, because it helps reinforce that "ancient knowledge" garbage that's out there, like "they could do things we couldn't do, therefore here's an insane conclusion about how they had magic/aliens/electricity/etc or were better than us and we don't know anything, p.s. here's more new age garbage." The same thing happens with the Pyramids as well, and it's often not that we can't do it, we just don't know how they did it, but we may figure out eventually.
More it's "we just don't care as much as they did and we've not advanced far enough yet to have rendered it trivial."
Like "could we build the pyramids today"? Heck yeah we could. But the real estate costs today, the lack of slave labour, the unions, the democracy, the insurance, the upkeep, the zoning and permits... it's just not worth it.
That's essentially what I was trying to say in the middle paragraph. There are plenty out there who do suggest it is literally impossible for us to build them, and this of course is said to help back some usually radically insane claim.
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@tonyshowoff said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
@tonyshowoff said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
Much like how the Romans knew more about making hydrolic cement two thousand years ago than we know today.
I agree with you, but I try to avoid stating things in that way, because it helps reinforce that "ancient knowledge" garbage that's out there, like "they could do things we couldn't do, therefore here's an insane conclusion about how they had magic/aliens/electricity/etc or were better than us and we don't know anything, p.s. here's more new age garbage." The same thing happens with the Pyramids as well, and it's often not that we can't do it, we just don't know how they did it, but we may figure out eventually.
More it's "we just don't care as much as they did and we've not advanced far enough yet to have rendered it trivial."
Like "could we build the pyramids today"? Heck yeah we could. But the real estate costs today, the lack of slave labour, the unions, the democracy, the insurance, the upkeep, the zoning and permits... it's just not worth it.
That's essentially what I was trying to say in the middle paragraph. There are plenty out there who do suggest it is literally impossible for us to build them, and this of course is said to help back some usually radically insane claim.
The cement thing we literally can't make hydrolic cement of the same quality today. Mostly because we don't need it like they did and just aren't willing to dedicate a thousand years of trial and error to looking for an equal or better solution (or are doing so and haven't had enough time elapse or gotten lucky enough, yet.) It's one of those things that it simply takes time, and having more money or a larger number of humans existing does little to speed up the trial and error process. So while we are sure that we can get there eventually, we have no idea when it will be and it might take a lot of work yet. It's a sad thing to have lost as it has affected buildings, especially canals, for centuries.
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The loss of knowledge of concrete was such a big deal that until the mid 1700s, we had gone over a thousand years without any idea of how concrete was made. So Rome was making concrete builds for hundreds of years longer than we've known about concrete in modern times.
That means that for well over a millennium... humans had to look upon the structures of the Roman Empire and say... that's so neat, what the heck is that material that they used?
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@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
The loss of knowledge of concrete was such a big deal that until the mid 1700s, we had gone over a thousand years without any idea of how concrete was made. So Rome was making concrete builds for hundreds of years longer than we've known about concrete in modern times.
That means that for well over a millennium... humans had to look upon the structures of the Roman Empire and say... that's so neat, what the heck is that material that they used?
It's interesting what history lost. Archimedes made steam engines 2000 years before we figured it out as well but it was useless at the time because slave labor was so cheap.
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@wirestyle22 said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
The loss of knowledge of concrete was such a big deal that until the mid 1700s, we had gone over a thousand years without any idea of how concrete was made. So Rome was making concrete builds for hundreds of years longer than we've known about concrete in modern times.
That means that for well over a millennium... humans had to look upon the structures of the Roman Empire and say... that's so neat, what the heck is that material that they used?
It's interesting what history lost. Archimedes made steam engines 2000 years before we figured it out as well but it was useless at the time because slave labor was so cheap.
Sadly... cheaper than water.
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@wirestyle22 said in Azure Outage... Again:
@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:
The loss of knowledge of concrete was such a big deal that until the mid 1700s, we had gone over a thousand years without any idea of how concrete was made. So Rome was making concrete builds for hundreds of years longer than we've known about concrete in modern times.
That means that for well over a millennium... humans had to look upon the structures of the Roman Empire and say... that's so neat, what the heck is that material that they used?
It's interesting what history lost. Archimedes made steam engines 2000 years before we figured it out as well but it was useless at the time because slave labor was so cheap.
The only reason why some empires f.e. Russia did exist so long (and keeps existing BTW).
