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Microsoft Reports a 775 Percent Increase In Usage of Azure Cloud Services (betanews.com) 29

Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: This weekend, Microsoft has given an insight into the impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on its services. The company says that there has been a huge increase in Teams usage, and there are now over 44 million daily users. In regions where there are isolation and home sheltering orders in place, Microsoft says that there has been a colossal 775 percent increase in usage of its cloud services. While there have not yet been any significant service disruptions, Microsoft says it has plans to increase capacity: "We are expediting the addition of significant new capacity that will be available in the weeks ahead. Concurrently, we monitor support requests and, if needed, encourage customers to consider alternative regions or alternative resource types, depending on their timeline and requirements. If the implementation of these efforts to alleviate demand is not sufficient, customers may experience intermittent deployment related issues. When this does happen, impacted customers will be informed via Azure Service Health."
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Microsoft Reports a 775 Percent Increase In Usage of Azure Cloud Services

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  • work from home but security says virtual desktops...

    what a waste of bandwidth and tax payer money, compute at the edge would be far better

    • Maybe you should just be happy they're doing this now instead of using your tax money to commute across the country in private jets.

  • Lies (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @01:39AM (#59891472)

    ""While there have not yet been any significant service disruptions"

    Azure is basically frozen for all of Europe, Africa, and much of the rest of the world. You can't create VMs, or resize existing ones. Discs can be provisioned but they may or may not actually be available when you try to attach them.

    Azure is completely fucked and has been for days.

    • by jojo900 ( 789829 )
      Is it true that Azure is fucked for days, do you have any links that can prove it ? any YouTube videos showing Azure VMs creation or resizing not responding, or any other kind of evidence? how is AWS coping with the pressure?
      • Well,

        Just look around the net. Google search much?

        https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]

        And they are giving priority to emergency services, first responders,etc.

        https://azure.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]

        If they have enough capacity, they don't have to worry who is trying to use that capacity. If they have to prioritise, they are either running out, close to running out or have some sort of bottleneck which can be an issue. So yeah, they seem to be aware that they have and may have issues.

    • by Halueth ( 776646 )
      Are you sure? Our infrastructure is still going strong with new components added/upscaled on a weekly basis (we're migrating to azure for our IoT solutions). So far, we haven't seen any problems in de West Europe and North Europe data centers. If you're in Switzerland, pherhaps, but that is because they're still rolling out Azure there and not everything is in place yet.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      Sorry but horseshit. We have no problem spinning up Azure instances here in Europe and none of our services have been at all disrupted although accessing them is slightly slower than usual. Everyone here is getting on with work as if nothing happened and MS currently have met all our SLAs.

      Have you considered that *you* have a problem like so many organisations do under the weight of their own infrastructure not coping with their own demands?

      • by nagora ( 177841 )

        Sorry but horseshit. We have no problem spinning up Azure instances here in Europe and none of our services have been at all disrupted although accessing them is slightly slower than usual. Everyone here is getting on with work as if nothing happened and MS currently have met all our SLAs.

        Have you considered that *you* have a problem like so many organisations do under the weight of their own infrastructure not coping with their own demands?

        No, we talked to MS and they told us it was known to them; it wasn't just us. They listed the regions with capacity which were all in America, Australia and Asia. They never suggested it was anything to do with our end.

        We had problems this morning but we have at least been able to get some disc added. We still can't provision new VMs. We've not had problems with the ones that were already up.

        You got lucky. Or something.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by RD_UK ( 6730010 )
          Unfortunately, this is completely correct. MS have had huge capacity issues in West Europe. I suspect some smaller-scale users may not notice the availability issues but these have been present for a while now and it has definitely been exacerbated by the situation with COVID-19. Specialised instance types are very often unavailable and some still never been available in West Europe and even some of the more memory focussed instance types have been intermittently unavailable lately. Teams also went down fo
      • by nagora ( 177841 )

        Just tried to deploy a little F4s:

        Code="SkuNotAvailable" Message="The requested size for resource xxxx is currently not available in location 'northeurope'

        WestEurope is the same at the moment. I've not tried others yet.

    • Bullshit. We have everything on Azure, table, blob storage, aks clusters, service bus, you name it. Still works like a charm. We do have resiliency built-in so minor hiccups don't affect our availability (several 9s).
  • When you shit on the cloud remember that if you build your own IT infrastructure to cope with a 775% increase in demand you would be fired on the spot for wasting money.

    Anyone who thinks their own systems are capable of scaling the way cloud providers have in the past several weeks is severely deluded. "Someone else's computer" is much bigger than yours.

    Yours Truly
    Someone whose only service disruption has been dealing with clients, vendors and EPCMs who run IT 100% in house, and are borderline uncontactable

  • by zenasprime ( 207132 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @05:28AM (#59891802) Homepage

    Not a single chmod joke anywhere.

  • Headline wrong (Score:3, Insightful)

    by diesel66 ( 254283 ) on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @07:42AM (#59892062)

    From BetaNews and Slashdot:
    "Microsoft Reports a 775 Percent Increase In Usage of Azure Cloud Services..."

    From Microsoft's site:
    "We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams' calling and meeting monthly users in a one month period in Italy..."

    It took me less than 10 seconds to see that. Perhaps the editors could devote that sort of time prior to submitting?

    • You didn't quote the whole sentence in the summary.
      In regions where there are isolation and home sheltering orders in place, Microsoft says that there has been a colossal 775 percent increase in usage of its cloud services.
      If you read the whole sentence, it's pretty clear that this isn't everywhere.
  • Rule number one: Don't go into the Cloud if you can't leave the Cloud again on the drop of a hat.

  • If YOU designed a service, how scalable would you make it? 2-3 times normal usage sounds OK but 7x sounds like quite a lot. Adding resources for 775% normal usage doesn't make economic sense for many businesses. Microsoft has clarified that the 775% surge was on Teams, not all Azure: https://www.cloudpro.co.uk/clo... [cloudpro.co.uk] So we don't know what the actual surge is, but would be interesting to see what best practice is.
  • It's only Teams they're talking about, and only in Italy.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]

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