Friday, February 04, 2011

Windows Azure Uptime Report: OakLeaf Table Test Harness for January 2011 (100.00%)

The Windows Azure Team started the new year right with no outages for a month’s operation of the test harness!

Following is the Pingdom monthly report for a single instance of the OakLeaf Systems Windows Azure Table Test Harness running in Microsoft’s South Central US (San Antonio) data center:

image  

Following are monthly uptime results for Windows Azure since it began commercial operation on January 4, 2010:

Year Month Uptime Downtime Outages ResponseTime
2010 Jan 99.75% 1h 50m 02s 13 735ms
2010 Feb 99.99% 0h 04m 19s 1 734ms
2010 Mar 99.98% 0h 10m 00s 2 737ms
2010 Apr 99.71% 2h 05m 01s 6 782ms
2010 May 99.65% 2h 29m 59s 8 669ms
2010 Jun 99.65% 2h 29m 59s 8 660ms
2010 Jul 99.70% 2h 15m 01s 11 526ms
2010 Aug 99.96% 0h 19m 58s 3 521ms
2010 Sep 99.94% 0h 19m 57s 5 521ms
2010 Oct 99.91% 0h 40m 01s 2 535ms
2010 Dec 99.90% 0h 44m 59s 3 670ms
2011 Jan 100.00% 0h 0m 0s 0 703ms

Note: Data for November 2010 is missing because the test harness became inoperable for a few days due to lack of support for the original Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.StorageClient library, which was replaced by Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll from the Windows Azure SDK v1.3. See my Updated Source Code for OakLeaf Systems’ Azure Table Services Sample Project Available to Download post of 11/17/2010 for more details and downloadable source code.

Note: The OakLeaf test harness is not subject to Microsoft’s 99.9% availability Service Level Agreement (SLA), which requires two running instances. The project runs in a single Small compute instance.

Lack of system upgrades during February and March would explain the higher uptime percentage.

2 comments:

Steve Marx said...

Please stop posting these. They're irrelevant and misleading.

To others who read this, in a scale-out platform like Windows Azure, the uptime of any given instance is meaningless. It's like measuring the availability of a bank by watching one teller and when he takes his breaks.

Anonymous said...

@Steve - I don't believe these statistics are irrelevant or misleading.

When all is said and done you’re running on a VPS and if you want redundancy you have to buy more than one instance. With the current pricing model Azure is a little more expensive than a managed dedicated server with equivalent performance at a quality provider.

I’ve worked at many small companies that ran a single server and had fantastic uptime and exceptional performance for years on end. If a business wants to move their application to “the cloud” and it won’t scale across smaller (aka cheaper) instances then the uptime of a single instance could be very important to them.