Azure Services is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. After a wobbly week, it is, once again, experiencing technical difficulties (outages and interruptions) which have impacted several products in the United States and abroad.
The problems from Monday started at 2 P.M. U.S. Eastern Time, and their peak affected roughly 10 services. These services included Websites, virtual machines, cloud services etc. This information was shared by Microsoft on its Azure Status website.
After over two hours of technical difficulties, Microsoft began to remedy some of the interruptions, but there was still a long way to go until the situation would be under control. The platform is still not at its normal status.
At 4.15 P.M. ET, Microsoft’s Cloud Services, which can be used to build, manage and deploy apps on the Azure cloud, are still having performance and availability issues in Japan, Brazil and four other U.S. regions.
Virtual machines, which enable users to deploy Linux, Windows server and other third-party software images to Azure did not perform well either. As a matter of fact, they were struggling even harder in geographic terms. They were only available in two of the Azure global regions.
It seems that Microsoft has faced several technical difficulties this week. First there was the Blue Screen of Death, triggered by the latest Windows updates, now the Azure services are struggling. The issues on Monday, with Azure, follow a string of service disruptions and technical issues which affected other products in several parts of the world throughout the last week, as well as the one before it.
What makes this situation even more distressing for Microsoft, is the fact that it has identified the Azure infrastructure and platform-as-a-service as one of the key tools which will ensure the current and future success of the company. In addition to this, Azure already competes with extremely strong IaaS and Paas vendors like Google, IBM, Amazon’s AWS division and many others.
Microsoft’s desire now is to shift from being a provider of software (which clients install on their computers) to a seller of subscription-based applications and cloud services hosted on their data centers. Azure and other software-as-a-service( SaaS) products, such as Dynamics and Office 365 are indicative of Microsoft’s desire to shift to a subscription-based provider.
Nevertheless, the only way that cloud computing services will succeed with enterprise clients is if they are reliable and stable enough. The latest outages and interruptions are not great news, and if the company is to succeed in the future, they must be kept to a minimum. If this doesn’t happen, CEOs and business managers will lose all confidence in Microsoft.