As some of you have noticed, and taken the time to report either by email or in the forum, the Silverlight Streaming service experienced an unplanned outage yesterday afternoon. As of this morning everything should be up and running again.
A bit more information about this issue:
Direct access to videos and video upload functionality was impacted, videos were still accessible via iframe invocation. For that reason applications were mostly not impacted by the problem, as most of them would be instantiated using the iframe invocation method.
The administration web site itself was not affected.
The data store was not affected.
The Silverlight Streaming service is now back online, and you should be able to render your videos and Silverlight applications from the service as before the outage.
However in order to restore availability we had to take some action that will possibly negatively impact the video playback rendering performance in some geographical regions, in particular Western Europe. The other regions should not see a significant deprecation in performance.
We are continuing to work on narrowing down the issue behind the instability of the last few days. Once again, allow me to thank you again for your patience and whoever took the time to report the issue.
As you may have noticed, the service is acting up again this morning. As a user so gently put it "It looks like the 'root cause' of the outage managed to grow new roots." I love this touch of humor in this very frustrating situation. We're working on it. Stay tuned.
Root cause has been identified and the fix applied. Allow me to thank everybody who took the time to report the problem, again, and renew my apologies on behalf of the team for the inconvenience it caused all of you.
We are investigating the root cause of the issues impacting the service again today. The impact is the same as two days ago. Sorry for the inconvenience. Stay tuned.
Two separate issues were identified and and addressed on the live site on Monday afternoon and Tuesday noon respectively. The Silverlight Streaming service should be back to full functionality as of Tuesday 1/27 12:30 PM PST. Thanks to everybody who took the time to report the problem. Renewed apologies for the inconvenience it caused all of you.
Even though the admin web site is up and running, there were several reports of videos or applications not being served out of the Silverlight Streaming service during the week-end. They have been escalated and are being investigated.
The impact is that such features as the video preview page or the application test page are not rendering properly, and that the third party applications relying on the service are not fully functional.
There is no immediate ETA for resolution. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience on the matter, as well as your continued support of the service while it is in Beta.
The Silverlight Streaming publishing plug-in for Expression Encoder has been updated to support the new Silverlight 2 templates that were added in Expression Encoder 2 SP1. It is available from the Microsoft Download Center here.
Interesting blog cross-references:
Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live has been upgraded to work with Silverlight 2 applications using the RTW bits. Remember, it will no longer work with Silverlight 2 apps using the Beta 2 bits, so please make sure to update such apps, if you have any, as quickly as possible not to impact your customers.
The upgrade will not affect your Silverlight 1 apps hosted in SLS.
Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live will be in maintenance mode this morning (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM PST) as we perform the upgrade to make it work with Silverlight 2 RTW bits. While we have no planned outage during this maintenance period, you may experience some intermittent timeouts as we cycle the servers out and back in rotation (half of them first, then the other half).
We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you again for you continued support and usage of this service.
The outcome of the upgrade is that Silverlight Streaming will work with Silverlight 2 apps using the RTW bits. It will no longer work with Silverlight 2 apps using the Beta 2 bits, so please make sure to update such apps, if you have any hosted in SLS.
The upgrade will not affect your Silverlight 1 apps hosted in SLS.
As we finally have time to perform the upgrade work to make the Silverlight Streaming service work with the Silverlight 2 RTW bits, it is important to note that your applications hosted in Silverlight Streaming will also have to be updated to use the Silverlight 2 RTW bits.
There is good information on ScottGu's Blog describing how to upgrade your applications from Silverlight 2 Beta 2 to Silverlight 2 RTW smoothly, so they do not break when Silverlight Streaming is updated. Note that this should not impact your Silverlight 1 applications hosted in Silverlight Streaming.
This service maintenance work is scheduled in the next few days, I will be posting updates on this blog to keep you informed.
As you have undoubtedly noticed, the Silverlight Streaming service has not yet been upgraded to work with Silverlight 2 RTW. This will be done shortly. Until this work is completed, here is a short FAQ about the side effects:
- Silverlight Streaming will work with Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 2 Beta 2 only
- The Silverlight Streaming upload stack relies on a Silverlight control, so the Browse button will be disabled if you have Silverlight 2 RTW onlyour machine
- This will be true for both the Manage Applications and Manage Videos scenarios
We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this delay, and are working to perform the upgrade as soon as possible.
The Silverlight Streaming ads pilot program has launched and is live in production!
A couple of weeks ago, we successfully launched the SLS ads trial (see previous references below). This means that for the very first time, we have opened up a Windows Live service to breadth developers to enable them to use the Microsoft adCenter Publisher platform. There is real US Dollar revenue associated to this pilot program. It is currently available in the US only, to people who can fill in a W9 form.
This pilot program allows you to upload video content to Silverlight Streaming and play it back with contextual ads relevant to the playback experience, based on keywords you provide at video upload time, or configure later on in the video properties. The selected participants will become adCenter Publisher account holders seamlessly, as the account provisioning into the ads platform is done directly when they decide to enable ads in their SLS-based video playback experience. This will allow them to login directly directly to https://beta.pubcenter.microsoft.com.
We are still accepting participants, so if you think this is for you, register on the web interest form, we'll process the pool of participants for the second batch of invites to the ads trial program shortly.
Previous references to the SLS ads trial program on this blog: March 26 blog post | April 29 blog post
The Silverlight Streaming service has been successfully upgraded to work with Silverlight 2 Beta 2. As mentioned in my previous post about this maintenance release, all Silverlight 2 Beta 1 applications hosted in SLS should be upgraded to use the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 runtime as soon as possible if it is not already done. They are no longer supported from SLS, and they will no longer work anyway as soon as the Beta 1 time bomb kicks in. The Silverlight 1 applications are not impacted by this service upgrade.
In conjunction with this SLS upgrade, all existing and new albums created on PhotoZoom are now displayed with the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 version of Deep Zoom. More information about this topic in the PhotoZoom section of Matt's blog.
As you may have already noticed, since the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 was released a week or so ago, and if you have upgraded the Silverlight runtime on your machine, not all applications hosted in Silverlight Streaming work correctly. This is due to several breaking changes in the Silverlight runtime between Beta 1 and Beta 2, which we intend to become compliant with later this week from the Silverlight Streaming service perspective.
This means that you have a few more days to upgrade your Silverlight applications hosted in Silverlight Streaming for them to continue to work with the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 control going forward. It is also important to note that regardless of the Silverlight Streaming work involved in this respect, the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 will expire (and no longer be usable) starting 30 days after the Beta 2 release date and no later than September 1, 2008.