[Outages-discussion] Azure Postmortem

[Joelle Maslak]

The last time I was responsible for a data center, 15 years ago, different
job, I can attest this happens FAST. Data center was new, had shiny AC
systems, backup power, redundancy, etc. it was 20% occupied. “Redundant” AC
units all tripped off (bug in vendor implementation). It went from 70F to
115F in about 5 minutes (I don’t know what happened after that because the
power unit the monitor was connected to tripped at that point but being
some areas of the DC still had power, I imagine it kept rising). We lost a
bunch of disks.

On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 11:46 AM Matt Hoppes <
mattlists at rivervalleyinternet.net> wrote:

> The only thing that stands out as odd to me is:
>
> "but in this instance, temperatures increased so quickly in parts of the
> datacenter that some hardware was damaged before it could shut down."
>
> How long does it take to shutdown a server?  It shouldn't take more than
> a minute or two I wouldn't think - and it seems it would be better to
> just power off than risk hardware damage if the temperature got too
> extreme.
>
> I don't understand that part.
>
> On 9/12/18 1:22 PM, Steve Mikulasik wrote:
> > MS made a statement about what took them down, sounds like they have
> > some facility upgrades to do
> > https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/history/
> >
> > *Summary of impact:* In the early morning of September 4, 2018, high
> > energy storms hit southern Texas in the vicinity of Microsoft Azure’s
> > South Central US region. Multiple Azure datacenters in the region saw
> > voltage sags and swells across the utility feeds. At 08:42 UTC,
> > lightning caused electrical activity on the utility supply, which caused
> > significant voltage swells.  These swells triggered a portion of one
> > Azure datacenter to transfer from utility power to generator power.
> > Additionally, these power swells shutdown the datacenter’s mechanical
> > cooling systems despite having surge suppressors in place. Initially,
> > the datacenter was able to maintain its operational temperatures through
> > a load dependent thermal buffer that was designed within the cooling
> > system. However, once this thermal buffer was depleted the datacenter
> > temperature exceeded safe operational thresholds, and an automated
> > shutdown of devices was initiated. This shutdown mechanism is intended
> > to preserve infrastructure and data integrity, but in this instance,
> > temperatures increased so quickly in parts of the datacenter that some
> > hardware was damaged before it could shut down. A significant number of
> > storage servers were damaged, as well as a small number of network
> > devices and power units.
> > While storms were still active in the area, onsite teams took a series
> > of actions to prevent further damage – including transferring the rest
> > of the datacenter to generators thereby stabilizing the power supply. To
> > initiate the recovery of infrastructure, the first step was to recover
> > the Azure Software Load Balancers (SLBs) for storage scale units. SLB
> > services are critical in the Azure networking stack, managing the
> > routing of both customer and platform service traffic. The second step
> > was to recover the storage servers and the data on these servers. This
> > involved replacing failed infrastructure components, migrating customer
> > data from the damaged servers to healthy servers, and validating that
> > none of the recovered data was corrupted. This process took time due to
> > the number of servers damaged, and the need to work carefully to
> > maintain customer data integrity above all else. The decision was made
> > to work towards recovery of data and not fail over to another
> > datacenter, since a fail over would have resulted in limited data loss
> > due to the asynchronous nature of geo replication.
> > Despite onsite redundancies, there are scenarios in which a datacenter
> > cooling failure can impact customer workloads in the affected
> > datacenter. Unfortunately, this particular set of issues also caused a
> > cascading impact to services outside of the region, as described below.
> >
> >
> >
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