Users complain that UK Azure is having capacity problems
We hear Sweden is lovely place for workloads to visit
Microsoft Azure capacity woes are back, and worse than ever, judging by the complaints of UK users.
A Register reader going by the handle of "Open Sorcerer" told us that, "So Azure UK is full. Like full full."
Our reader's firm spends millions of pounds per year on Azure, but says there's no additional quota available in any UK region – an architect told them that there was no capacity in either the UK South nor UK West regions, which are the only regions for Azure in the area. In our reader's case, this means no new VMs or AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) clusters.
They told us that a Microsoft support person had recommended Sweden. However, this suggestion is not helpful for organizations subject to regulatory and compliance restrictions. Shunting healthcare data offshore, for example, is unlikely to meet with the authorities' approval. Frankly, the situation should have been foreseen. Microsoft is not short of tools for creating tables of figures and forecasts.
The Open Sorcerer is not alone. A look at social media has shown plenty of users running into similar problems, with one commenting, "Pushing their datacenters to capacity with no real plan to build out or expand them is just piss poor planning." Another also claimed they'd been "pushed towards other regions such as Sweden."
Perhaps Microsoft is just a victim of its own success and been taken by surprise by demand. When we asked the Windows-maker if there were capacity issues in the region, a spokesperson for the company gave The Register the following non-answer: "Azure is delivered through a global network of around 80 regions worldwide, giving customers flexibility in how they deploy and scale workloads. As customer demand for Azure services in the UK remains strong, we continuously monitor and adjust how resources are allocated to ensure reliable support for existing customer workloads and maintain service availability and performance."
It did not respond to our queries about whether its support staff had steered users towards Sweden or any other region.
Responding to these recommendations, Mark Boost, CEO of cloud platform Civo, noted that sending workloads abroad could easily turn into a sovereignty nightmare. He told El Reg, "When organizations are told to move workloads outside the UK due to capacity constraints, it stops being just a technical issue and becomes a sovereignty question.
"For many sectors, data residency isn't optional, it's a regulatory and an operational requirement. Shifting workloads to another country, even temporarily, can introduce compliance risk and complexity that many businesses simply can't accept.
"… When capacity runs tight, sovereignty can't be an afterthought."
Users running in the UK regions have been here before. In 2020, the words "Azure seems to be full" echoed around the WWW as Azure refused to allocate new resources due to a lack of "sufficient capacity." Then the blame was placed on a surge, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The finger of accusation is pointing at AI this time around.
The consensus from people close to Microsoft is that the company is working on the problem, and things should ease later this year, perhaps by around October. In the meantime, however, perhaps users should consider a deployment in the land of bork if sovereignty isn't a concern, or else hope their Microsoft representative is feeling in a giving mood.
Or maybe it is time to kick off a migration project to somewhere less blighted by capacity constraints. ®