Azure clients up in arms over ‘full’ UK South area
Microsoft Azure is refusing capability to cloud clients within the firm’s UK South (UKS) area, with points across the availability of Azure digital machines (VMs) – particularly in AMD-based compute, these geared toward HPC workloads and graphics processing unit (GPU)-equipped providers.
That’s in line with feedback made to Pc Weekly and in message board threads on Reddit, the place many blame Microsoft’s drive to roll out datacentre resource-hungry Copilot AI to the detriment of current buyer necessities.
One commenter mentioned: “It’s well-known to be horrible and apparently is ready for extra capability to return on-line on the finish of the 12 months.”
One other mentioned: “Horrible capability points in UKS. It appears to be impacting one availability zone greater than others, and AMD CPUs [central processing units] are much more scarce. We’ve been executing a migration and have confronted various hurdles securing quota and capability. I’m instructed Microsoft are within the strategy of shifting their very own inside providers equivalent to M365 out of these datacentres to unlock capability for purchasers.”
Azure’s UK South area has had capability points for a while. Earlier this 12 months, one buyer reported being caught part-way by means of an Azure Digital Desktop migration resulting from not with the ability to safe capability.
“With 75% of our workers moved, and round 40 vCPU used, we’re being denied all further capability requests, even after elevating tickets and escalating,” they mentioned. “Due to the character of the apps that we use, low latency is important (actually, it prefers native LAN). We’re additionally required by a lot of our purchasers to host knowledge within the UK solely as a result of nature of what we do.
“We’d efficiently migrated round 75% of the corporate, after which when attempting to extend quota to complete the job, discovered that we had been denied capability for the whole lot we tried, v5 and v6 [Azure VMs], AMD, Intel. We escalated a number of tickets, and had been instructed that our request can be backlogged and denied by the area proprietor resulting from capability.”
One other commenter mentioned they may get capability for the platform as a service providing they work on, however couldn’t be certain about future requests: “The service I work on has capability in UK South – however what occurs if we have now to scale out additional to make room for extra assets?”
UK South is considered one of two Azure areas within the UK. The opposite is UK West, primarily based in south Wales.
UK South can supply Availability Zones, which implies operations are unfold throughout three datacentres to supply resilience. Many UK South clients run main operations there and use UK West – which is a single datacentre – as a catastrophe restoration failover location.
Some disgruntled clients consider Microsoft has prioritised the roll-out of datacentre capability for Copilot AI to the detriment of current providers. In different phrases, that roll-out of GPU-equipped servers – that are massively resource-hungry – have put a squeeze on datacentre capability.
“Studying between the traces, the frenzy to AI has f****d Microsoft’s bread and butter providers,” mentioned one commenter. “So, they’ve successfully shot themselves of their foot pushing out a product nobody desires, to the detriment of 1 folks do.
“All assets are thrown into the AI abyss. It’s additionally created {hardware} shortages that don’t appear to have an finish.
AI gross sales focus
Owen Sayers, an unbiased advisor with a long time of expertise in delivering public sector IT, mentioned: “In UK South, Microsoft presents 10 various kinds of GPU. In UK West, they’ve simply two, and the A100 there isn’t any spring rooster. Microsoft are focusing closely on gross sales of AI, and if clients within the UK are shopping for GPU, it’s just about at all times going to be in UK South as their anchor tenancy.
“That can improve warmth, energy and cargo,” he added. “Nothing restricts datacentre capability quite a lot of hundred power-draining GPUs. Additionally, Microsoft desires to promote GPUs with the whole lot, so maybe their focus has drifted from conventional cloud in direction of AI they usually aren’t managing capability properly in consequence.”
In response to knowledge from Barbour ABI and ComputerWeekly, round 121MW of datacentre capability is because of full in 2026, in areas that come inside Azure’s UK South and West areas. The majority of that can be at a Virtus improvement in Excessive Wycombe in Bucks, a Kao improvement at Harlow in Essex, and for Vantage Information Centres in Newport, South Wales, which might be inside UK West and will permit capability to be reallocated.
Microsoft responded to a abstract of complaints with the next: “Azure is delivered by means of a worldwide community of round 80 areas worldwide, giving clients flexibility in how they deploy and scale workloads. As buyer demand for Azure providers within the UK stays robust, we constantly monitor and alter how assets are allotted to make sure dependable assist for current buyer workloads and preserve service availability and efficiency.”
