Monday 29 October 2012

So nice of Microsoft to keep the level low :)

As I am starting to worry about 99.999% website uptime and availability for TeamMentor.net (let me know if you know any good website monitoring services, or tools, or APIs), it is nice to know that if do we achieve that, we will be way above the average :)

For example, here is what happened today (2:13am on 29th/Oct/2012) if you click on 'Schedule service' or 'Check service status' from the new shiny Microsoft Suface website:


Oops , this what we get on https://myservice.surface.com :


Don't they have website monitoring or WAFs over there?

It looks like the problem is in the https part of the surface.com site (the http redirects to a microsoft.com url)


Now here an interesting twist, I was going to recommend that they used ASafaWeb but all looks good from its point of view (note how the main request returns a valid page)


so I though that maybe the problem was with using Chrome, and IE would work, but no such luck, IE shows the same error:


There is definitely something interesting going on here, I wonder what it is :)

The realisty is that it is really complex to provide online services. Its an environment with very little margin for error,  where every small detail counts and semi-real-time feedback/reaction is really important.