Skip to main content

Microsoft Refunds to Azure Leap Day Bug Customers And Drops Pricing

Microsoft announced that it will provide a credit to all current Windows Azure customers in response to a system outage due to February 29 leap day bug. The company decided to to provide a 33% credit to all customers of Windows Azure Compute, Access Control, Service Bus and Caching for the entire affected billing months for these services, regardless of whether their service was impacted.

 

image

 

Microsoft corporate vice president of the server and cloud division, Bill Laing wrote in the blog post summarizing the service disruption -

“After an incident occurs, we take the time to analyze the incident and ways we can improve our engineering, operations and communications.  To learn as much as we can, we do the root cause analysis but also follow this up with an analysis of all aspects of the incident.  The three truths of cloud computing are: hardware fails, software has bugs and people make mistakes.  Our job is to mitigate all of these unpredictable issues to provide a robust service for our customers.”

In the detailed post mortem, he explained that Windows Azure was attempting to use an invalid date, Feb 29, 2013 as part of a system verification process which was the main root cause. The bug was discovered on Feb 28 afternoon about 75 min after it started causing problems and Azure was shut down. The entire system was back online by 2:15 AM on March 1.

Additionally, Microsoft also reduced the pricing structure. In another blog post, the pay-as-you-go pricing, 6 month plans, extra small compute pricing has been reduced as below:

“Windows Azure Storage Pay-As-You-Go pricing has been reduced by 12% ($0.14 to $0.125)
6 Month Plans for Windows Azure Storage have been reduced across all tiers by up to 14%
Windows Azure Extra Small Compute has been reduced by  50% ($.04 to .$02)”

[Source 1, Source 2]

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Your Google Apps Account is Changing

Google is about to make more of its services available to organizations with Google Apps accounts. This is an early adopter phase, and all domains may not get this option to move to the new infrastructure. What this means for you: In addition to the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications, Google Apps users may now access many more Google services with their Google Apps accounts.     Those who are eligible for this early adoption, Google Apps administrator will be presented with the above banner to start with the migration. In your organization, you can transition selected pilot users and admins, or you can start the transition now for all your users. The transition for pilot users can be reverted if necessary. After successful transition, your users will now be able to use other Google popular products like AdSense, AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, Android, Blogger, Finance, Google Desktop, News, Orkut, Reader, Voice, YouTube (Full list here ). Als...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Turn Your Android Phone into a Fully-Automated Superphone

What if your phone automatically went silent when you step into the movie theatre? Texted your significant other when you finished your long commute? Or automatically turned down the volume when a particularly loud friend called? It can; here's how. Android application Tasker gives you total rules-based automation for your Android phone. It's not free, but it offers a free 14-day trial download. Tasker can do nearly anything on your phone. It's mostly limited by your imagination. Here are some up-front ideas about neat automations that come to mind: • Set preferences for each application: Give the Kindle app a longer screen time-out. Make Maps or Foursquare automatically turn on GPS, and have a file browser launch when you trade out SD cards. Have your music and other audio apps lower the volume to 50 percent when you plug in headphones, so you never get a way-too-loud moment. • Time of day automation: Make your phone go into airplane mode overnight, but re-conne...
Post a Comment
Read more

Google Wallet: The Future Innovative Mobile Payments

Earlier few months, Google unveiled future innovative way of payment technology – Google Wallet. Today, Google released its first version of the Android app with Sprint Nexus S 4G phones through an over the air update. Google Wallet is an app that lets you pay for things using your phone, either by tying your credit card or gift or pre-paid cards. It works using an near field communication (NFC) embedded chip and there is no swiping required.   According to Techcrunch , Google Wallet will not work everywhere your credit card will. It won’t work everywhere there’s an NFC-friendly card reader, either. Wallet requires an NFC reader based on a new-ish specification, and only a select bunch of retailers have gotten around to updating. The post also had some great review and walkthrough in real life. This app is now available to Samsung Nexus S owners on Sprint, through PayPass sensors at Radio Shack, Foot Locker, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Sunoco, CVS/pharmacy, etc. retailers. ...
Post a Comment
Read more