Public Cloud – Out of Your Control
One of the things you need to consider when using/choosing a public cloud service is availability. This is a fair question for any software wherever it is hosted. The difference is who controls outages. Without any criticism of public cloud services, there are outages, and you have to manage that possibility.
There are other outages that occur other than the un-expected ones. Azure is planning an outage for their web servers on which your site could be hosted, allowing updated features (which you don’t have to worry about deploying). The difference is that this update is being performed according to the Schedule of Microsoft staff, and you have no recourse for web sites hosted there.
Here is the Azure announcement:
“As part of our ongoing commitment to performance, reliability, security, and a great developer experience, we are deploying a new set of features and enhancements to Windows Azure Web Sites in all regions. For details on these new features and enhancements, visit the Windows Azure Web Sites forum.
This update—scheduled for October 25–26, 2013—will require a maintenance operation that may cause your web site to restart one or more times. We are scheduling the update to occur during nonbusiness hours as much as possible in each region.”
So, you are a 24/7 web site. Unless you can move your web site to another host during the updates, you are most likely going to experience some outage, and you have no control over when it occurs.
I don’t find this need to disrupt service to be un-reasonable, nor, with the potential customer base hosted on a server, would it make sense to try and accommodate the needs of each individually. So, the point is, if you are going to use the public cloud, expect interruptions to occur out of your control.
Of course you could spin up your own web servers on Azure or somewhere else and host your stuff there during the transition.
Leave your comments about public cloud updates below, or send your opinion to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben