My previous blog posts, Azure Outage Post-Mortem – Part 1 and Azure Outage Post-Mortem Part 2,made some assumptions based upon limited information coming from blog posts and twitter. I just attended a session at Ignite which gave a little more clarity as to what actually happened. Sometime tomorrow you should be able to view the session for yourself.

BRK3075 – Preparing for the unexpected: Anatomy of an Azure outage

The official Root Cause Analysis they said will be published soon, but in the meantime here are some tidbits of information gleaned from the session.

The outage was NOT caused by a lightning strike as previously reported. Instead, due to the nature of the storm there were electrical storm sags and swells, which locked out a chiller plant in the 1^st datacenter. During this first outage they were able to recover the chiller quickly with no noticeable impact. Shortly thereafter, there was a second outage at a second datacenter which was not recovered properly, which began an unfortunate series of events.

During this 2nd outage, Microsoft states that “Engineers didn’t triage alerts correctly – chiller plant recovery was not prioritized”. There were numerous alerts being triggered at this time, and unfortunately the chiller being offline did not receive the priority it should have. The RCA as to why that happened is still being investigated.

Microsoft states that of course redundant chiller systems are in place. However, the cooling systems were not set to automatically failover. Recently installed new equipment had not been fully tested, so it was set to manual mode until testing had been completed.

After 45 minutes the ambient cooling failed, hardware shutdown, air handlers shut down because they thought there was a fire, and staff had been evacuated due to the false fire alarm. During this time temperature in the data center was increasing and some hardware was not shut down properly, causing damage to some storage and networking.

After manually resetting the chillers and opening the air handlers the temperature began to return to normal. It took about 3 hours and 29 minutes before they had a complete picture of the status of the datacenter.

The biggest issue was there was damage to storage. Microsoft’s primary concern is data protection, so short of the enter datacenter sinking into a sinkhole or a meteor strike taking out the datacenter, Microsoft will work to recover data to ensure no data loss. This of course took some time, which extend the overall length of the outage. The good news is that no customer data was lost, the bad news is that it seemed like it took 24-48 hours for things to return to normal, based upon what I read on Twitter from customers complaining about the prolonged outage.

Everyone expected that this outage would impact customers hosted in the South Central Region, but what they did not expect was that the outage would have an impact outside of that region. In the session, Microsoft discusses some of the extended reach of the outage.

Azure Service Manager (ASM) – This controls Azure “Classic” resources, AKA, pre-ARM resources. Anyone relying on ASM could have been impacted. It wasn’t clear to me why this happened, but it appears that South Central Region hosts some important components of that service which became unavailable.

Visual Studio Team Service (VSTS) – Again, it appears that many resources that support this service are hosted in the South Central Region. This outage is described in great detail by Buck Hodges (@tfsbuck), Director of Engineering, Azure DevOps this blog post.

Postmortem: VSTS 4 September 2018

Azure Active Directory (AAD) – When the South Central region failed, AAD did what it was designed to due and started directing authentication requests to other regions. As the East Coast started to wake up and online, authentication traffic started picking up. Now normally AAD would handle this increase in traffic through autoscaling, but the autoscaling has a dependency on ASM, which of course was offline. Without the ability to autoscale, AAD was not able to handle the increase in authentication requests. Exasperating the situation was a bug in Office clients which made them have very aggressive retry logic, and no backoff logic. This additional authentication traffic eventually brought AAD to its knees.

They ran out of time to discuss this further during the Ignite session, but one feature that they will be introducing will be giving users the ability to failover Storage Accounts manually in the future. So in the case where recovery time objective (RTO) is more important than (RPO) the user will have the ability to recover their asynchronously replicated geo-redundant storage in an alternate data center should Microsoft experience another extended outage in the future.

Until that time, you will have to rely on other replication solutions such as SIOS DataKeeper Azure Site Recovery, or application specific replication solutions which give you the ability to replicate data across regions and put the ability to enact your disaster recovery plan in your control.

My previous blog post says that Cloud-to-Cloud or Hybrid-Cloud would give you the most isolation from just about any issue a CSP could encounter. However, in this particular failure had Availability Zones been available in the South Central region most of the downtime caused by this natural disaster could have been avoided. Microsoft published a Preliminary RCA of the September 4th South Central Outage.

The most important part of that whole summary is as follows…

“Despite onsite redundancies, there are scenarios in which a datacenter cooling failure can impact customer workloads in the affected datacenter.”

What does that mean to you? If your applications all run in the same datacenter you are susceptible to the same type of outage in the future. In Microsoft’s defense, this really shouldn’t be news to you as this has always been true whether you run in Azure, AWS, Google or even your own datacenter. Failure to plan ahead with data replication to a different datacenter and a plan in place to quickly recover your applications in those datacenters in the event of a disaster is simply a lack of planning on your part.

While Microsoft doesn’t publish exact Availability Zone locations, if you believe this map published here you could guess that they are probably anywhere from a 2-10 miles apart from each other.

In all but the most extreme cases, replicating data across Availability Zones should be sufficient for data protection. Some applications such as SQL Server have built in replication technology, but for a broad range of applications, operating systems and data types you will want to investigate block level replication SANless cluster solutions. SANless cluster solutions have traditionally been used for multisite clusters, but the same technology can also be used in the cloud across Availability Zones, Regions, or Hybrid-Cloud for high availability and disaster recovery.

Implementing a SANless cluster that spans Availability Zones, whether it is Azure, AWS or Google, is a pretty simple process given the right tools. Here are a few resources to help get you started.

Step-by-Step: Configuring a File Server Cluster in Azure that Spans Availability Zones

How to Build a SANless SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance in Google Cloud Platform

MS SQL Server v.Next on Linux with Replication and High Availability #Azure #Cloud #Linux

Deploying Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Failover Clusters in #Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

SANless SQL Server Clusters in AWS

SANless Linux Cluster in AWS Quick Start

If you are in Azure you may also want to consider Azure Site Recovery (ASR). ASR lets you replicate the entire VM from one Azure region to another region. ASR will replicate your VMs in real-time and allow you to do a non-disruptive DR test whenever you like. It supports most versions of Windows and Linux and is relatively easy to set up.

You can also create replication jobs that have “Multi-VM Consistency”, meaning that servers that must be recovered from the exact same point in time can be put together in this consistency group and they will have the exact same recovery point. What this means is if you wanted to build a SANless cluster with DataKeeper in a single region for high availability you have two options for DR. One is you could extend your SANless cluster to a node in a different region, or else you could simply use ASR to replicate both nodes in a consistency group.

The trade off with ASR is that the RPO and RTO is not as good as you will get with a SANless multi-site cluster, but it is easy to configure and works with just about any application. Just be careful, if your application exceeds 10 MBps in disk write activity on a regular basis ASR will not be able to keep up. Also, clusters based on Storage Spaces Direct cannot be replicated with ASR and in general lack a good DR strategy when used in Azure.

For a while after Managed Disks were released ASR did not fully support them until about a year later. Full support for Managed Disks was a big hurdle for many people looking to use ASR. Fortunately since about February of 2018 ASR fully supports Managed Disks. However, there is another problem that was just introduced.

With the introduction of Availability Zones ASR is once again caught behind the times as they currently don’t support VMs that have been deployed in Availability Zones.

I went ahead and tried it anyway. I seemed to be able to configure replication and was able to do a test failover.

I’m hoping to find out more about this limitation at the Ignite conference. I don’t think this limitation is as critical as the Managed Disk limitation was, just because Availability Zones aren’t widely available yet. So hopefully ASR will pick up support for Availability Zones as other regions light up Availability Zones and they are more widely adopted.