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G-Cloud bigwig says soz for Cloud Store outage

Azure crash downed gov e-catalogue for 2 hours

The G-Cloud governor has apologised to public sector customers for the Cloud Store outage yesterday but pointed out that downtime is not confined to an off-premise delivery model.

The apps store is hosted on the Azure platform, which was down for eight hours, although the Cloud Store was only out of action for roughly a quarter of that time as Microsoft moved the platform to a different install.

Director of G-Cloud Chris Chant wrote on his blog that the current version of CloudStore was developed for free, while the government is being charged for hosting along with the accompanying minimum maintenance on a "pay as you go" basis.

He wrote: "The Azure instal we are using does not provide multi service deployment. This is because the CloudStore is not critical government system.

"As a result it is unlikely that we would ever pay the premium that would be needed to guarantee “five nines” up time for the site as it simply isn’t a wise way to spend scarce resources," he added.

Some customers working with the site emailed to get the data they required and while the outage was "disappointing" and work is being undertaken to "speed up the recovery process", Chant said there was "sufficient fallback" in the system.

"There are, of course, those who say 'this is the problem with cloud'. Well, those of us who have worked in a 'non cloud' IT environment for the last two or three decades have not been free of such outages I’m afraid, nor are we likely to be in the future."

However, he thanked Cloud Store builder Solidsoft "for helping us out of the problem" and gave "apologies to customers that were inconvenienced." ®

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