Last April I was in sunny Las Vegas for “The Experts Conference” (TEC). While there, I reported on a keynote given by Kevin Allison, the General Manager for Exchange Customer Experience. Kevin discussed the challenges of developing a single product that has to function well both on-premises and in the cloud and also referred to the issues that Microsoft faced to build out and maintain the infrastructure that supports Exchange Online.

The problems recently suffered by Office 365 brought Kevin’s remarks to my mind and a suspicion, possibly totally unfounded, has formed that issues such as not ensuring that network components have sufficient redundancy or messing up a DNS configuration might well be symptoms of an infrastructure that is struggling to cope with success. There’s no doubt that hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of mailboxes have migrated to Exchange Online since Microsoft launched Office 365 formally on June 28. And when you think about it, handling success like that can’t be easy… and the rebalancing of mailboxes across databases to ensure consistent load must be hellish.

So I’ve written a piece for WindowsITPro.com to reflect on the matter. See what you think…

– Tony