I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but man, I'm irritated by Microsoft outages for Xbox Live updates.
Why? Is it because they're multi-hour affairs making the service unavailable to users for ridiculous time periods?
Sure, I'm a bit irritated on this front -- look, the current outage is a 14 planned hours.
But I'm more irritated that they have a planned 14-hour outage -- and they can't accomplish their maintenance inside that time frame (they're currently an hour late, with "no ETA").
For the last 2 (and maybe all 3) of the last 3 scheduled downtimes, operations folks have slipped significantly outside of the scheduled downtime window.
I'm not talking from a naive perspective -- I manage large-scale, multinational, enterprise systems and services. And I don't do multi-hour outages for maintenance activities. I don't do more than a handful of hours even when I'm rolling systems from one infrastructure to a new, upgraded infrastructure.
But Microsoft can plan a 14-hour outage (during business hours; another thing I'm not allowed -- and wouldn't think -- to do), and slip outside of it. Repeatedly.
This is not sour grapes ("I wish I could have that much time to do my upgrades") -- it's professional umbrage.
I wonder what their internal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are? Because, honestly, I feel like they're taking advantage of the fact that their end users can't do anything in the face of a protracted outage.
Maybe Major Nelson will have another podcast interview with ops folks about the delay, where they explain "how complex something like this is".
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