The following message appeared in Windows Azure OS Updates RSS on November 13, 2013:
We are responding to customer feedback and now adding information to this page on the next upcoming Guest OS release. We hear that you want to know when your roles will reboot. Guest OS releases can move around by days or even a week. The announcements will give projected and approximate dates for the upcoming releases. Updates to the Guest OS Matrix are in process, but not completed yet.
What? Microsoft suddenly cares about Azure Cloud Services users?
Surely not. Not a chance. Here's why.
Those users who have guest OS automatic updates switched on (that's the default osVersion="*" in the service configuration) will be updated withing a rather long timeframe - typically several days - and this will happen before that new guest OS version can be explicitly selected in the Management Portal.
So those announcements will basically mean: oh, dudes, we gonna roll out something which you can't try yourself yet and your service can break in an unexpected way withing the following several days. WTF should the user do? Should he pray or should he pray harder? Should he go to his psychoanalyst and talk about the problem?
WHAT ON EARTH SHOULD USERS DO WHEN THEY SEE THAT NOTICE?
Anyone who cares about their service being broken by a guest OS update (you should too if you claim your service is a Serious Business) have switched guest OS automatic updates off long ago. They manually change the OS version in a testing environment first, ensure that it still works, then do they same in production. These users control their update process and don't care of those announcement just as well.
These announcements are the most useless Microsoft initiative EVER. Just extra noise in the RSS.
And once again - if you have a service hosted as Azure Cloud Service and you want your service to run in stable manner then you should have switched guest OS automatic updates off long ago.
We are responding to customer feedback and now adding information to this page on the next upcoming Guest OS release. We hear that you want to know when your roles will reboot. Guest OS releases can move around by days or even a week. The announcements will give projected and approximate dates for the upcoming releases. Updates to the Guest OS Matrix are in process, but not completed yet.
What? Microsoft suddenly cares about Azure Cloud Services users?
Surely not. Not a chance. Here's why.
Those users who have guest OS automatic updates switched on (that's the default osVersion="*" in the service configuration) will be updated withing a rather long timeframe - typically several days - and this will happen before that new guest OS version can be explicitly selected in the Management Portal.
So those announcements will basically mean: oh, dudes, we gonna roll out something which you can't try yourself yet and your service can break in an unexpected way withing the following several days. WTF should the user do? Should he pray or should he pray harder? Should he go to his psychoanalyst and talk about the problem?
WHAT ON EARTH SHOULD USERS DO WHEN THEY SEE THAT NOTICE?
Anyone who cares about their service being broken by a guest OS update (you should too if you claim your service is a Serious Business) have switched guest OS automatic updates off long ago. They manually change the OS version in a testing environment first, ensure that it still works, then do they same in production. These users control their update process and don't care of those announcement just as well.
These announcements are the most useless Microsoft initiative EVER. Just extra noise in the RSS.
And once again - if you have a service hosted as Azure Cloud Service and you want your service to run in stable manner then you should have switched guest OS automatic updates off long ago.
