One of the core selling points of Azure is disaster recovery & business continuity.
And yet multiple times this year alone the sim has been struck down with what are effectively total global outages. Regardless of what their marketing spiel says, Azure seems like it is very vulnerable to some single point of failure, with global consequences.
I’m sure Azure has redundancy built in, at multiple levels…it just doesn’t seem to work very well.
Something to think about as 2024 looms.
Another question that was asked in another thread was whether we really need to have all this cloud infrastructure.
Without it we would lose so much, things that the peer sims can’t really offer:
Live traffic
Live weather
Azure text to speech for ATC
Terrain, and photogrammetry streaming
Cloud based profile backup
And with 2024 we are supposed to be getting the ability to stream in planes to lower the installation footprint. It’s unclear at this time what level of failure would be needed to allow the sim to load, then find you cannot fly the plane you want because of cloud issues.
I can’t see why ATC has to be cloud-based, it never was in previous sims and we had different voices for different controllers, AI pilots etc. On the other hand, the EditVoicePack utility was needed to add realistic airline call signs and so on but the sound files were tiny and had minimal impact on disk space. It seems like technology for the sake of it to me, or maybe it’s a global field test for something much bigger…
Internet outages are nothing new unfortunately. At the time of the London Olympics, workmen on one of the Stadiums cut through a major data cable and cut off half of North London and parts of Essex. The company I worked for had their HQ in Essex, AND their backup servers too, so we had no online comms for 3 months while the blame game dragged on until someone finally paid up for the repairs. These Azure outages could be much worse!
I’m still telling myself that 2024 ATC will be a cloud based large language model that can adjust for location, language, dialect, and have a less scripted back-and-forth dialogue between pilot and controller.
4 years in, quite frankly I’m getting tired of the whole thing because the server issues, software glitches, 3rd party aircraft not working as expected ($$) wasted, I’m very close to packing it in and moving on to something else. I fear my SIM flying days are coming to an end. Nice way to push customers away with constant issues spoiling my fun. I dunno what I’m gonna do, just ramblings thus far. Grr.
Hobanagerik’s point was that Azure, as a global cloud system, advertises itself specifically with advanced failover characteristics. Here we have MSFS users in Europe that cannot reach Azure services yet when using a VPN to route through the US it works. If Azure was truly failover as advertised, it would have rerouted requests itself. This, along with multiple recent outages, points to significant architectural issues in Azure.
so the last weeks i learn…
no more new cloud game for me,
i use 2020 as long i can,then will see if they get this mess work.
since weeks only trouble with the severs and onlinestuff,nearly any day something new…
it is a shame.
so again i do not start the sim now,do not want to lost all settings again
There’s far too much reliance on server based areas that we don’t need, it needs to be streamlined so that the it’s the bare minimum required to run the game as that will lower the chances of continuous server issues that have plagued the game recently.
More information needs to be saved locally, ATC, UI settings etc and rely only on servers for actual streaming of data/the world. It appears the idea was a good one just not thought through well enough as they’d no backup plan on place, for too long server issues have obviously been an issue, for too long there is no Plan B.
This makes me fearful for MSFS2024, is it’s the same server structure, with the same needless requirement on external servers, then it’ll be the same server issues over and over and over again.
As you point out, that is the exact opposite of the core of 2024. They want more in the cloud to reduce its footprint, so ever more reliance on Azure cloud services.
The follow on complaint would be something along the lines of “why should I have to buy a larger hard disk just to take the sim”.
A thin client in 2024 will only increase the dependency on the cloud. After that last outage it’s nice to see MS getting the “attention” it needs to maybe close the gaps in their tech. But, I’m not holding my breath. IMHO, the cloud was the biggest con job in the history of IT, and the industry happily bought into it.
Without the network, this sim is unplayable, unless you fly at night so you can’t see the ground.
My understanding is the FS2024 will be more dependent on servers and cloud data. In my opinion, this does not bode well for users.
A brilliant simulator could be ruined for many unless they server support system is more robust.
I have had countless problems over the last few years (UK) with connectivity issues and server speed which results in poor visuals and stuttering as the sim loads scenery and aircraft.
We must hope that they can overcome these concerns
In an unfortunate turn of events, no sooner had Microsoft’s Azure Support mouthpiece suggested to users that they test their app’s resilience with the Azure Chaos Studio, it appears the company has kicked off its own chaos testing in production.
There is zero reason why we can’t have Assistance Settings saved locally, but every time there’s server issues these get reset. This is the reliance on areas that could be saved locally I’m talking about, kbs of data not gbs.
I don’t think there’s much point in discussing it. These decisions have been made. However, I am reminded of Total War Pharaoh, who had to refund their customers half the purchase price and issue an apology. I remain open minded and willing to be surprised.
Yeah, I don’t want to get back to offline simming again. But also I hope they fix what’s causing those outages happening this year. I know no service can’t be 100% of the time up and running, but Azure had, in short period of time, a few outages and it’s taking them a few hours - a day to get back to work.
