When The Cloud Isn’t Scalable



Back to work and we run immediately into a problem with the Azure cloud.


Our technology scales to thousands of CPUs for tasks like encoding video and calculating big data availabilities reports for rights (which easily runs into tens of millions of simultaneous calculations for a single query).


We’re trying to test our new availabilities engine and we’ve found that Azure has run out of CPUs! Rather than the 200 default we’re being rationed to just 16, and most of these are dedicated to other services.


Microsoft assure us that this situation is ‘temporary’ due to ‘unprecedented demand’ but it’s worrying that they cannot fulfil the basic promise of the cloud - unlimited scalability on demand.