Azure account suspended due to credit limit means cloud service instance deployments are automatically deleted - mitigation?

Question

Problem

We deploy a mixed SaaS, PaaS, IaaS solutions on Micorosft Azure. Recently our account was suspended due to a Microsoft credit limit.

1) The account billing and technical contact received no warning of the approaching credit limit. When the account was suspended alerts were raised instantly. In response I simply lifted the credit limit and the account was accessible again.

2) All VMs could then be started again within seconds and thrid party add-ons were operational automatically.

3) Cloud Services were displayed but all the web/worker role instances in each were stopped. On attempting to start it was clear the deployments had been deleted !

Questions

• Does any one know or understand why the deployment packages are removed when an Azure account subscription has been disabled ?

• VM, storages accounts, add-ons are persist so why delete the cloud service instances / deployment packages ?

• Anyway to mitigate this issue ?

Result is 60 min downtime to upload and deploy packages from source control. Examining enterprise accounts and invoicing.

Thank you for any advice.

Scott

Answer 1

Currently, subscriptions which has monthly credits such as MSDN, MPN and Bizspark plus has a feature called spending limit. This feature is enabled by default to prevent any charges on your credit card. When this sending limit is triggered, the subscription is disabled for the remaining billing cycle and will be automatically re-enabled when the credit is reset which is on the start of the new billing cycle.

When the subscription is disabled, Cloud services (web and worker role) deployments are deleted as only the deployment file is uploaded on Azure and the source file would still be available by the developer. However, Virtual machines are created within Azure platform, hence VMs are stopped de-allocated when the subscription is disabled. The web services deployments are dealt with differently ie they are deleted it's a legacy of how the platform was built and is scaled.

The Azure portal shows the credit utilized and remaining balance for the subscription and notifying the credit status over email is still not available. However, when the subscription is disabled, a notification is sent to the account owner.

Possible mitigation involves:

• moving to standard payment terms , away from pay-as-you-go account.

• remove the credit limit

• possibly a continuous deployment strategy via Team Foundation Server or the like could automate redeployment (no doubt there are other automation methods too).

Unfortunately if the Azure subscription is suspended service deployments are deleted and must be uploaded again. If you have multiple large deployment packages this could take many hours.

Hope that helps someone.

Answer 2

Additionally, if you have shared websites, they will get suspended. There is no way to resume them until the credit period is reset, so you need to delete and recreate them.