Windows Azure Pack is a great technology but sometimes Microsoft seems to be missing the complexity of providing services to hundreds if not thousands of customers, each of them with different needs. Standardization is good but it should provide enough flexibility to manage things in a reasonable way. So here’s the scenario: you deployed WAP and your customer starts to buzz into your server because how good WAP actually is. Rock solid, able to run most demanding websites. Great technology, I said.

However, one of your customers runs over his allotted quota of one of the seventeen metrics you can monitor for your websites. Since your customer didn’t opt for a pay-per-use billing model, you just suspend his website, like any hoster in the world would do, and your customer calls in to buy more “of that something”. He pays (if needed), if you’re like us he gets an add-on to increase his quota over a standardized plan and, after a while and a little synchying, WAP states that his account is now back in quota. End of story.

Well, almost! Because your customer calls in again stating that his website is still suspended while on his portal he sees no over-quota warnings and you realized that he is right: no warnings, increased quota but website still suspended. Hmmm…

From now on, you start a journey to understand why WAP didn’t re-enable that website. You try to update plans, subscriptions, add-ons, force subscription resynchying, force plans to update, open-up Powershell to look for a well-hidden parameter that will allow you tell WAP to re-evaluate quota and re-enable website, or (at least) a cmdlet to tell WAP to re-enable that #&%$@#!$ website because I’m the one who rules here. Apparently, you discover that there isn’t anything like that: no way to re-enable a website that is over quota. So you basically look at portal where it states that counters will be reset in 29 days and you start thinking if WAP really wants to re-evaluate quota in 29 days from today. You wait in the hope that it will take a little time to start that website again but no luck. After hours, you really start to think that WAP will keep that website suspended until it will be time to reset counters, which is obviously totally unacceptable. But the most scary thing is that you cannot force it to change his mind. You’re basically powerless.

After a little checking, it turns out what I stated is not true for all quota items. For example, a short while after upgrading (by adding an add-on) sent bytes quota, a suspended website has been restarted by WAP itself. However, there are other counters that seem to be evaluated only when their configured period will expire, for example CPU burst and received bytes. No matter how long you wait after changing those, WAP won’t restart the affected website. I’m talking about hours here, not minutes, but I couldn’t wait days to check if it would happen after 29 days as suspected. [...]