Microsoft just sent out an email notifying our company that there will be scheduled maintenance for our Windows Azure environment.
We will be performing maintenance on our networking hardware. We are scheduling the update to occur during nonbusiness hours as much as possible, in each maintenance region. Single and multi-instance Virtual Machines and Cloud Services deployments will reboot once during this maintenance operation. Each instance reboot should last 30 to 45 minutes. We suggest using availability sets in the architecture to protect against downtime caused by planned maintenance. This maintenance will proceed by updating instances in only one Fault Domain (FD) at a time for the Cloud Services and Virtual Machines in an Availability Set.
Now our website consists of a Cloud Service with 8 (small) instances of a web role. With these 8 instances, is there still a possibilty of downtime for the website? Do we need to use 'Availability Sets' or are we safe? Thanks for any info..