Watch your time zones on Windows Azure!
Posted on June 8th, 2009
So I deployed some code to Windows Azure and was initially surprised that it was running differently than what I had observed locally.
Turns out and once you think of it its a no brainer … my code was running in a different time zone. All my other services were in EST but this was PST. The solution in my case is to keep everything as GMT and then do any necessary calculations :)
You might wonder if this is documented anywhere. To be honest, I have no idea since most of the documentation has been very poor. The website for Azure has circular links that will drive you nuts and the local SDK docs are just focused more on the API and are too incomplete as well.
Update: Since posting I’ve been told all servers will be and are currently in GMT time. Cool!
Tags: Azure
Filed under Software |
3 Responses to “Watch your time zones on Windows Azure!”
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Steve Marx Says:
June 9th, 2009 at 11:39 amThe servers in Windows Azure should be running in GMT. Did you see something different?
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typemismatch Says:
June 9th, 2009 at 3:22 pmSteve, you are totally correct. I went back and checked my code – it wasn’t a PST/EST delta but a GMT/EST one.
Was that documented somewhere that I can reference?
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Steve Marx Says:
June 9th, 2009 at 7:16 pmI don’t know if it’s anywhere in the documentation, but we blogged a while back on blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure when we made the move to GMT (it actually was PST before that).