The global outage of Windows Azure Storage due to an expired SSL certificate again has struck big waves on Twitter. The ironic aftertaste is particularly due to the fact that Windows Azure was recently chosen by Nasuni as the “Leader in Cloud Storage”. Especially because of performance, availability and write errors Azure could stick out.

Back to business

Of course, the test result has been rightly celebrated on the Windows Azure team’s blog (DE).

“In a study of the Nasuni Corporation various cloud storage providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, HP, Rackspace, Google were compared. The result: Windows Azure could reap in almost all categories (including performance, availability, errors) the winners crown. Windows Azure is there clearly shown as a “Leader in Cloud Storage”. Here is an infographic with the main findings, the entire report is here.”

However, the Azure team was brought back to earth with a bump due to the really heavy outage which could be felt around the world. They should rather go back to the daily business and ensure that an EXPIRED SSL CERTIFICATE never lead to such a failure. Because this has relativized the test result and thus shows that winner crowns have no meaning at all. Very surprising is that always evitable errors lead to such catastrophic outages. Another example is the problem with the leapyear 2012.