Under New Strains, Azure Cloud Prioritizes, Adds Capacity -- Visual Studio Magazine

Under New Strains, Azure Cloud Prioritizes, Adds Capacity

By David Ramel
03/31/2020

Microsoft added and prioritized Azure cloud computing capacity as the industry as a whole experiences new strains such as an increase in remote work caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Azure's Pipelines, providing CI/CD DevOps functionality, suffered a "mid-week slowdown as tech world goes remote" reported DevClass last week. Earlier in the month, Microsoft Teams suffered some issues, mainly in Europe, reported ZDNet.

"We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams' calling and meeting monthly users in a one month period in Italy, where social distancing or shelter in place orders have been enforced," Microsoft said in an update on cloud services continuity. What's more, "We have seen a very significant spike in Teams usage, and now have more than 44 million daily users. Those users generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams daily in a single week."

The cloud giant is prioritizing new cloud computing capacity that was added in response.

"Our top priority remains support for critical health and safety organizations and ensuring remote workers stay up and running with the core functionality of Teams," the company said. Azure is providing the highest level of monitoring for the following:

First Responders (fire, EMS, and police dispatch systems)
Emergency routing and reporting applications
Medical supply management and delivery systems
Applications to alert emergency response teams for accidents, fires, and other issues
Healthbots, health screening applications, and websites
Health management applications and record systems

Microsoft is also limiting free offers and some resources for new subscriptions

This week's post also details several other measures taken, in a Q&A format, including actions the company is taking to prevent capacity constraints.

Users can consult the following resources for more information on how Azure is holding up under the new strains:

Azure Service Health – for tracking any issues impacting customer workloads and understanding Azure Service Health
Microsoft 365 Service health and continuity – for tracking and understanding M365 Service health
Xbox Live – for tracking game and service status

Microsoft said that despite the surge in demand, Azure hasn't had any significant service disruptions.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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