Deep Dive: Azure Resource Manager Outage

Microsoft Azure Resource Manager is the globally distributed system through which customers purchase, configure, and maintain their Azure workloads. When services were recently interrupted, a temporary outage impacted the ability of some customers to manage their workloads. This situation was particularly interesting because the system architecture both helped reduce customer impact and simultaneously made it challenging for engineers to understand and mitigate the issue.

Through this talk, we’ll share our post-incident findings to give audience members insight into how this specific system operates and how emergent behavior in a socio-technical system can evade a system’s defenses. We’ll also demonstrate an incident report structure which helps prevent common problems like after-the-fact reasoning and instead helps readers effectively learn from the investigation.