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VMware Restores Cloud Foundry Service After Outages
VMware restored service and apologized for two outages last week that affected some users of its relatively new Cloud Foundry service.
Those service disruptions don't compare in scale with the four-day outages experienced by Amazon Web Services customers, which concluded early last week. Amazon runs the largest cloud service, hosting some large Web infrastructure companies. The Cloud Foundry service, on the other hand, is only a few weeks old, is still in beta and had shorter disruptions.
Cloud Foundry, introduced on April 12, is a cloud service that VMware is touting as the first open platform as a service, or PaaS. VMware offers its own hosted version of Cloud Foundry, aimed at letting developers build applications and run them on its service.
The first Cloud Foundry outage occurred last Monday, on April 25, and lasted about 10 hours. Those most affected were new customers who received their credentials the previous evening, said VMware's Dekel Tankel in a blog post. The Monday outage was the result of all eight cloud controllers losing connectivity to a storage subsystem. The root cause was a "partial outage of a power supply in a storage cabinet which impacted access to a single LUN," Tankel noted.
The next day's outage occurred when an engineer touched a keyboard, which caused a complete outage of the network infrastructure fronting Cloud Foundry, according to Tankel. It was Cloud Foundry's first compete outage. It lasted about 75 minutes.
"During this outage, all applications and system components continued to run," Tankel said. "However, with the front-end network down, we were the only ones that knew that the system was up. We take full responsibility for these issues and apologize to our users who were impacted by them. We can and will do better, having already learned from these incidents."
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.