The year is coming to a close, but with a little over a week left Microsoft is fitting in more announcements as it continually clarifies the scope of Azure services. Azure CTO Mark Russinovich put out a blog post about efforts to improve Azure Active Directory availability. He indicated that the team focuses on partitioning, creating fault domains, scaling and safely deploying, while ensuring high redundancy and no single points of failure. Moving forward, a "completely fault-decorrelated identity service" is coming as a means of offering authentication in the event of a temporary failure.