Lars did a deep dive on the late March Azure outage and I wanted to share a
comment that was left on that video by user Dan James.
Quote "Methinks this past week, DNS took a big old dookie" end quote.
Yes, you're actually correct Dan. You know that SysAdmin joke,
whenever there's a problem, it's always DNS.
That is precisely what happened this past week to Microsoft causing yet again,
another Azure outage. Today, we are talking about those DNS issues,
Oracle WebLogic on Azure virtual machines and Azure Functions has turned five
and has received an award. Lots to get into hi,
I'm Gwen and welcome to another episode of Azure this week.
But before we dive into this other news, I have some other news.
We've just launched our new ACG student program.
If you're a student with an active eligible email address,
you will now be able to join our community of Cloud Gurus at a discounted rate.
This is a long-term program to help make cloud learning more accessible for
teachers, students, and educators.
You can find a link with more details in the show notes. Alright,
now on to some news.
Around 21:00 hours UTC on April 1st,
Azure DNS started experiencing an availability issue. This of course,
caused failures accessing and managing Azure services for many customers across
multiple regions.
The Azure DNS servers experienced a surge in DNS queries targeting a set of
domains hosted on Azure.
And this specific sequence of events exposed a code defect in the DNS service,
which led to an overload on the service and a decrease in availability.
According to Azure, the DNS services automatically recovered themselves by
22:00 hours and the majority of services recovered by 22:30.
So there's some good news in here.
I quote "recovery time exceeded our design goal" end quote. So yes,
there were outages,
but it's good to know that recovery time was quicker than expected.
And they've mentioned that they're already working on repairing the code defect
and improving the automatic detection and mitigation of unusual traffic
patterns. Let's be 100% honest here. We can't hope for zero outages.
That's just not possible with any cloud platform or any service that lives on
the internet,
but we can hope for speedy recoveries and transparency into what
happened and what is being done to avoid the issue in the future.
So Microsoft kudos for you on handling this outage.
Alrighty, then let's move on to some WebLogic news.
Back in June of 2019, Microsoft and Oracle announced a partnership.
Said partnership includes Oracle Linux, Oracle database,
integration between Oracle cloud infrastructure and Azure.
And of course Oracle WebLogic server support.
If you're not familiar with WebLogic,
it's a server that you can use to deploy,
run and distribute Java based applications,
similar to Apache Tomcat or IBM WebSphere. Recently,
Azure has announced a bunch of new common use cases for WebLogic,
including base image, single working instance, clustering,
load balancing via app gateway, database connectivity,
integration with Azure active directory,
caching with Oracle coherence and consolidated logging with the ELK Stack.
With all the news of new technologies and programming languages and frameworks,
it seems like there's something new every single week.
It's easy to think services like WebLogic or programming languages like Java are
old school and no longer worth learning, or even in use.
The truth couldn't be further from that.
So it's great to see that Azure continues its support for things like this.
Alrighty, and finally, it's serverless time.
Onto the next and final piece of news for this episode, Azure functions.
Forrester has named Microsoft as a leader in the Forrester Wave:
functions-as-a-service platforms, Q1 2021.
Based on their evaluation of Azure Functions in their report,
Forrester recognized investments in quote "onboarding,
developer tools and support and support for development and debugging on local
machines" end quote.
And they also called out functions support for stateful capabilities.
And this is of course thanks to Durable Functions.
We'd like to give a big shout out to the Azure Functions team,
awesome accomplishment, and we wish you continued success.
Also a big happy birthday to Azure Functions. Yes.
On March 31st Azure Functions turned five.
If you're looking to get hands on with Functions,
check out the Cloud Guru challenge of the month. In this challenge,
we are asking you to create a 100% Azure hosted version of your resume.
Shameless plug, because yours truly is actually hosting this challenge.
And you have until May 31st to submit your projects.
You'll find a link in the show notes for all those juicy details.
And that is it for this episode of Azure this week,
don't forget we have a discord.
I'll make sure to add the invite link in the show notes as well.
And we have office hours, study groups.
A bunch of us are in there just chatting about all things cloud.
So come and join us.
If you encountered any issues due to this DNS outage on Azure,
or maybe you're already working on your Cloud Guru challenge,
I'd love to hear from you,
leave your thoughts and comments in the comments area.
Don't forget to subscribe, to stay up to date with all the clouds,
keep being awesome cloud gurus. I'll see you in the next one.