alt Hacker NewsI mean its Microsoft and its Azure. How much can go wrong clicking yourself a few/hundred non autoscaling normal VMs?
There is so much workload running on Azure, i never heard of VMs go away.
If Microsoft can source hardware for Azure, Microsoft can source hardware for Github.
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there's a lot that can go wrong with a hypervisor, even including hiding hardware issues from the guest OS.
We don't think about it because we've been quite spoiled with excellent virtual machine platforms (KVM, Xen and even VMWare).
Those that have worked a lot with VirtualBox will be aware of this, it can be deeply unnerving that VM technology is the default way to deploy things after you've spent sufficient time with VirtualBox. (which: is very good for its original purpose, but not for reliability).
The question is: Does Azure use something more like VirtualBox, or more like KVM?
HyperV exhibits properties closer to VirtualBox.
I've had Windows Server VMs soft crash and hard crash on Azure. Some soft-lock and a restart via Azure gets them back. Some times the only fix has been to power off / deprovision - then power on again (i.e. a restart didn't fix it). It's not common, but I've encountered it multiple times. These are with operating systems that were created in Azure from their images.