Global Outage Impacting Microsoft’s Cloud Services

As you may have heard by now, there’s currently a worldwide outage affecting a number of key Microsoft services - you can follow the action on twitter.

Despite the fact that we run our infrastructure entirely on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, we have managed to escape the now 8 hour outage mostly because we were able to find workarounds to keep our deployments running smoothly.

We hope these simple instructions can help others get by in the meantime.

How to update your deployment without SSL access to storage:

- These steps assume the Visual Studio 2012 and the latest Azure SDK.  The gist of the approach is that we can use Azure’s Powershell tools to publish a deployment directly from the local File System, bypassing Azure storage. This approach works even as updates that are uploaded through the Azure portal continue to fail. 

- On the first page of the Publish dialog of your Azure deployment project, select “Sign in to download credentials” and save the file.

- Now right click on that same Azure deployment project and select “Package” (not “Publish”)

- Copy the paths to the files copied to the release folder of your deployment project at *\bin\Release\app.publish

- Install Windows Azure Powershell 

- (Reboot)

- At a Azure Powershell prompt, execute

• Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile “C:....publishsettings”
• Get-AzureSubscription
• Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName “Windows Azure MSDN - Visual Studio Ultimate” -CurrentStorageAccount “sample”
• Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName “Windows Azure MSDN - Visual Studio Ultimate”
• New-AzureDeployment -ServiceName “sample” -Slot “Staging” -Package “C:...cspkg” -Configuration “C:....cscfg” -Label “Powershell Deployment”

- And that’s it! Once staging has been deployed, you can perform a VIP swap as normal.