Microsoft Azure data deleted because of DNS outage

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." -- Leslie Lamport. I feel this should be rephrased for cloud computing at this point. The more people rely on cloud, the more these global fuck-ups are going affect them. Makes me feel pretty good about that server rack in my garage that addresses most of my own (and my business') compute needs.

I just don't hear any good things about Azure. That is unfortunate, because I'd love AWS to have some competition.

Sounds like they built a dead-man's switch and then broke the process through which the man and the switch communicate.

&gt; The deletions were automated, triggered by a script that drops TDE database tables when their corresponding keys can no longer be accessed in the Key Vault, explained Microsoft in a letter reportedly sent to customers.<p>By what logic is this NOT a terrible idea?

It appears that the SLA guaranteed uptime for Azure SQL Database is 99.9% or 99.99%, depending on tier. That equates to the following allowable downtime per month (which I think is what they base SLA fulfillment on):<p>99.9: 43m 49.7s<p>99.99: 4m 23.0s<p>Sounds like they need to cough up some money for their four 9s customers...