Skip to main content

Azure Subscription - Lesson learned related to credi card

By
One of my first project on Microsoft Azure is in production from 2011. More than 4 years the system ran without major issues. Every 4-5 months we released a new version of the product.
We have a maintenance and a support team that has a clear list of check lists that needs to be checked every day, week or month. For example, a health check similar with a smoke test is done every day. Every week, the available space of the storage account is checked. At the end of each month we check the expiration date of certificates and so on.

Running a product on an Azure subscription for so long will force you to have a very good process for maintenance and support team. Of course, this process was not perfect from the first day. The checklist was changed and improved in time.

Last week we discovered that an important check was... forgotten....

You know, each Azure subscription is connected to a credit card that is used for billing. And this credit card expires after 2 or 3 years.
What do you think that happens when the credit card expires and you don't update the credit card information?
Your subscription will be disabled. This means that all the services that you are running on that Azure subscription will be suspended. Of course before this, Microsoft will notify you via emails and you will have plenty of time to update the credit card information.
In our case, something happened and we missed the emails notifications that should have alert us about payments issues. In the end we ended up with the Azure subscription suspended and our system was down for some hours.
Luckily, the Azure support team offered us all the support and re-enabled our subscription until we were able to update the credit card information.

Lesson learned: You should add to the checklist of maintenance and support team all external dependencies or resources that can expire, like credit cards or billing status.
Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 20, 2016 at 9:04 AM

    I appreciate your guidance for uploading about Cloud Computing here. I really need to know about it. Great work!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

By
After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

By
In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cloud Myths: Cloud is Cheaper (Pill 1 of 5 / Cloud Pills)

By
Cloud Myths: Cloud is Cheaper (Pill 1 of 5 / Cloud Pills) The idea that moving to the cloud reduces the costs is a common misconception. The cloud infrastructure provides flexibility, scalability, and better CAPEX, but it does not guarantee lower costs without proper optimisation and management of the cloud services and infrastructure. Idle and unused resources, overprovisioning, oversize databases, and unnecessary data transfer can increase running costs. The regional pricing mode, multi-cloud complexity, and cost variety add extra complexity to the cost function. Cloud adoption without a cost governance strategy can result in unexpected expenses. Improper usage, combined with a pay-as-you-go model, can result in a nightmare for business stakeholders who cannot track and manage the monthly costs. Cloud-native services such as AI services, managed databases, and analytics platforms are powerful, provide out-of-the-shelve capabilities, and increase business agility and innovation. H...
Post a Comment
Read more