329: Azure Front Door: Please Use the Side Entrance

Welcome to episode 329 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and special guest Elise are in the studio to bring you all the latest in AI and cloud news, including – you guessed it – more outages, and more OpenAI team-ups. We’ve also got GPUs, K8 news, and Cursor updates. Let’s get started! Titles we almost went with this week

• Azure Front Door: Please Use the Side Entrance – el -jb
• Azure and NVIDIA: A Match Made in GPU Heaven – mk
• Azure Goes Down Under the Weight of Its Own Configuration – el
• GitHub Turns Your Copilot Subscription Into an All-You-Can-Eat Agent Buffet – mk, el
• Microsoft Goes Full Blackwell: No Regrets, Just GPUs
• Jules Verne Would Be Proud: Google’s CLI Goes 20,000 Bugs Under the Codebase
• RAG to Riches: AWS Makes Retrieval Augmented Generation Turnkey
• Kubectl Gets a Gemini Twin: Google Teaches AI to Speak Kubernetes
• I’m Not a Robot: Azure WAF Finally Learns to Ask the Important Questions
• OpenAI Puts 38 Billion Eggs in Amazon’s Basket: Multi-Cloud Gets Complicated
• The Root Cause They’ll Never Root Out: Why Attrition Stays Off the RCA
• Google’s New Extension Lets You Deploy Kubernetes by Just Asking Nicely
• Cursor 2.0: Now With More Agents Than a Hollywood Talent Agency

Follow Up

04:46 Massive Azure outage is over, but problems linger – here’s what happened | ZDNET

• Azure experienced a global outage on October 29, affecting all regions simultaneously, unlike the recent AWS outage that was limited to a single region.
• The incident lasted approximately eight hours from noon to 8 PM ET, impacting major services including Microsoft 365, Teams, Xbox Live, and critical infrastructure for Alaska Airlines, Vodafone UK, and Heathrow Airport, among others.
• The root cause was an inadvertent tenant configuration change in Azure Front Door that bypassed safety validations due to a software defect. Microsoft’s protection mechanisms failed to catch the erroneous deployment, allowing invalid configurations to propagate across the global fleet and cause HTTP timeouts, server errors, and elevated packet loss at network edges.
• Recovery required rolling back to the last known good configuration and gradually rebalancing traffic across nodes to prevent overload conditions.
• Some customers experienced lingering issues even after the official recovery time, with Microsoft temporarily blocking configuration changes to Azure Front Door while completing the restoration process.
• The incident highlights concentration risk in cloud infrastructure, as this marks the second major cloud provider outage in October 2025.
• Despite Azure revenue growing 40 percent in the latest quarterly report, Microsoft’s stock declined in after-hours trading as the company acknowledged capaci...