How to get notified about planned maintenance for Azure services

One of the biggest advantages of using Cloud services is the fact that we no longer need to maintain the Hardware and infrastructure. Using PaaS offerings takes it even further and we no longer need to care about updating services, applying security patches and so on.

The fact that Cloud providers take care of updating and maintaining services does not necessarily mean we as a service consumers will not be affected at all. In fact, in most cases we will be affected but depending of the type of the business, the impact could be minor or significant.

If we are dealing with a mission critical application, we need to know when maintenance happens by the Cloud provider and get ready for the consequences. Generally, I believe it's always good to know about such incidents.

For instance, imagine we know there is going to be a maintenance operation going on, on our database server at a particular time. If we see some strange or different behavior from the database at that particular time, at least we know that it could be the consequence of the maintenance and no need to start debugging and digging deep into details to discover the issue. We may also avoid the deployments and releases while a maintenance is being done on critical resources.

Fortunately, It's so easy to get notified about planned maintenance for Azure services. We just need to use Azure Service Health.

To do so, select the Service Health resource in the portal and then go to Service issues menu item.

There you can set alerts to be notified about planned maintenance for different Azure resources in advance.

The following is an example alert email I have received.