OakLeaf Systems: Uptime Report for my Live OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project: October 2013 = 100.00%

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Uptime Report for my Live OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project: October 2013 = 100.00%

My (@rogerjenn) live OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project demo project runs two small Windows Azure Web role compute instances from Microsoft’s South Central US (San Antonio, TX) data center. This report now contains more than two full years of monthly uptime data.

Barbara Darrow (@gigabarb) asserted “Microsoft likes to tout the fact that it runs Windows Azure at data centers worldwide. Yesterday compute instances across most of those regions were disrupted. Not good” in a summary of her Whoopsie: Windows Azure stumbles again post of 10/31/2013 to GigaOm’s Cloud Computing blog:

Microsoft Windows Azure had a bad day Wednesday with compute capability severely impacted worldwide throughout the day, as first reported by The Register. Compute service was partially disrupted across nearly all regions, according to the Azure status page,

At 2:35 a.m. UTC (7:35 p.m. PDT) the company said:

We are experiencing an issue with Compute in North Central US, South Central US, North Europe, Southeast Asia, West Europe, East Asia, East US and West US. We are actively investigating this issue and assessing its impact to our customers. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the impact. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.

A flurry of updates followed throughout the day and as of 10:45 a.m. UTC (3:45 a.m. PDT) on Thursday, the status report declared that the problem had been addressed and the company was “remediating” affected services.

Microsoft said the issue impacted the swap deployment feature of service management. As explained in PC World: Azure offers both a staging environment to let users test their systems, and a production environment separated by the virtual IP addresses used to access them. Swap deployment operations are used to turn the staging environment into the production environment.

Update: What this meant was that while existing applications continued to work, new code could not be deployed to production until the swap deployment issue could be resolved. … [Emphasis added.]

Read the full article here.

Full disclosure: I’m a registered GigaOm analyst.

The problem didn’t affect my Windows Azure demo site, as shown in the following Pingdom message and reports:

Here’s the detailed downtime report from Pingdom for October 2013:

Following is the first page of the detailed Pingdom response time data for October 2013:

You can check the site’s Public Status Page (shown for 10/31/2013) by clicking here:

This is the twenty-ninth uptime report for the two-Web role version of the sample project since it was upgraded to two instances. Uptimes below SLA 99.9% minimums are emphasized. Reports will continue on a monthly basis.

Month	Year	Uptime	Downtime	Outages	Response Time
October	2013	100.00%	00:00:00	0	720 ms
September	2013	99.95%	00:00:20	2	1,094 ms
August	2013	100.00%	00:00:00	0	850 ms
July	2013	100.00%	00:00:00	0	814 ms
June	2013	100.00%	00:00:00	0	750 ms
May	2013	100.00%	00:00:00	0	854 ms
April	2013	100.00%	00:00:00	0	842 ms
March	2013	100.00%	00:00:00	0	717 ms
February	2013	98.78%	08:10:00	3	799 ms
January	2013	100.00%	00:00:00	0	628 ms
December	2012	100.00%	00:00:00	0	806 ms
November	2012	100.00%	00:00:00	0	745 ms
October	2012	100.00%	00:00:00	0	686 ms
September	2012	100.00%	00:00:00	0	748 ms
August	2012	99.92%	00:35:00	2	684 ms
July	2012	100.00%	00:00:00	0	706 ms
June	2012	100.00%	00:00:00	0	712 ms
May	2012	100.00%	00:00:00	0	775 ms
April	2012	99.28%	05:10:08	12	795 ms
March	2012	99.96%	00:20:00	1	767 ms
February	2012	99.92%	00:35:00	2	729 ms
January	2012	100.00%	00:00:00	0	773 ms
December	2011	100.00%	00:00:00	0	765 ms
November	2011	99.99%	00:05:00	1	708 ms
October	2011	99.99%	00:04:59	1	720 ms
September	2011	99.99%	00:05:00	1	743 ms
August	2011	99.98%	00:09:57	2	687 ms
July	2011	100.00%	00:00:00	0	643 ms
June	2011	100.00%	00:00:00	0	696 ms

Update 5/7/2013: Added links to those previous uptime reports currently accessible. I don’t know why some posts are missing from the Internet.

The Azure Table Services Sample Project

See my Republished My Live Azure Table Storage Paging Demo App with Two Small Instances and Connect, RDP post of 5/9/2011 for more details about the Windows Azure test harness instance.

I believe this project is the oldest continuously running Windows Azure application. I first deployed it in November 2008 when I was writing Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform for Wiley/WROX, which was the first book published about Windows Azure.

The application runs the default set of Windows Azure Diagnostics. About 5 GB of Event Counter data provides the source data for my Generating Big Data for Use with SQL Azure Federations and Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure Clusters post of 1/8/2012.

For more details about the Table Services Sample project or to download its source code, visit its Microsoft Pinpoint entry. Following are Pinpoint listings for four ~~three~~ other related OakLeaf sample projects, two of which are live in the South Central US data center: