SLA clarifications

[alex]

I'm afraid my post got lost somewhere in other threads so I'll start a new one.

I was re-reading it (https://developers.google.com/appengine/sla) and the following raised a couple questions.

"Eligible Application" means an Application that has been created by Customer using the High Replication Datastore setting.

The questions are:

1. "Customer" term is not defined anywhere in the SLA (unless I missed it) so, I'm not really sure whether Customer means Billing Administrator (for a paid app) or it now relates to App Engine Premier Accounts only, or both. OTOH, Customer is defined as "the business entity agreeing to these terms" in AE TOS. So, this looks more like a Premier Accounts only but I might have missed something.

2. There's no mention about what billing setting that Application could/should have: paid, only premier or even a free quota. The latter actually fits the original quote sentence, but I'd don't think it really is the case.

To sum up the above, the real question is: under which conditions an app deployed/running on AE is covered by the SLA? (paid / premier / only between Google and a business entity or can be a single developer / etc)

Sorry if this is not the right place to ask such a question. SO is neither I guess, and I can't use Billing Requests form as it asks for a App ID and this is not about a specific app deployed on AE. Could someone from AE team clarify the above or direct me to an official channel (e.g. appengine_pre...@google.com email address?)

Thanks!

Alex.

[Barry Hunter]

Seems pretty clear here:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html
who the SLA applies to.

Anyone actually paying for the service.

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[alex]

Right. Thanks for the link, Barry. 

The thing is, that's just a page describing it in a marketing-like style. That page, however, isn't mentioned anywhere in TOS nor SLA.

I don't mind running my apps "for me and my friends" (which I did and am doing on AE) but when it comes to business and you practically have to give guarantees to your customers. The guarantees/whatever are TOS and SLAs and a "features and pricing table page" won't cut it as lawyers and other legal/whatever people and entities will only consider TOS and SLA.

The other problem with that page is, Google changed lots of things recently, including deprecation and other policies. There's a chance that features/pricing page just isn't updated yet. Again, it's referenced in neither TOS nor in the SLA.

Don't get me wrong. This is not a complain. I'm just trying to figure out my options from the legal/agreement point of view (tech side is awesome).

> channel (e.g. appengine_premier_...@google.com email address?)

>
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> Thanks!
> Alex.
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[alex]

So, the only mention of SLA in TOS is the following:

"Google warrants it will provide the Service in accordance with the applicable SLA"

Could someone from AE team clarify where it is specified what applicable SLA means and where it can be applied (aside from features/pricing page which has no legal base/authority for an business entity defined as "Customer" in TOS as the page is not mentioned anywhere in TOS).

I'm just trying to understand what guarantees my company can give to our customers based on AE TOS and SLA (again, if applicable without applying for a Premier account).

Thanks a lot,

Alex.

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hey Alex,

The SLA applies to all apps using HRD (as outlined in the ToS).  While it technically applies to Free apps, the compensation for failure to meet the SLA is a refund of a portion of your monthly bill, since Free apps don't pay anything there would be no compensation.  The specifics about what is covered under the SLA are in the the SLA link you provided (in terms of which services are covered).

Customer is defined in the ToS as noted in the previous response.

All upcoming changes to the ToS can be found here: https://developers.google.com/appengine/upcoming_terms which is referenced in the ToS.

You're correct that the current terms doesn't link to the SLA, that's an oversight that we'll correct.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Greg D'Alesandre

Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

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[alex]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for a quick reply! I was about to send you private email but didn't want to bother you.

This is awesome. 

The "problem" was I needed to convince my sort of team-mates and legals that we're backed up by a TOS and SLA while making promises to our clients. I didn't really bother to read AE TOS and SLA from the top to the bottom 'till we decided (recently, just a couple days back) to officially register a company (Italy-based) and move our commercial service, the startup will be initially based on, to App Engine.

I gotta say, over the past years, and recently even more, I can't find any product/technology that would match App Engine as a whole, including built-in services and APIs it offers to devs and enterprises (plus, Cloud Storage, Prediction API, ...)

Of course it has its bugs and limitations but so does any other product. The thing is, it's so much worth it comparing to managing your MongoDB instances, sharding, replications, HAproxy, nginx, provisioning and a whole bunch of other stuff, even though all of the latter are awesome technologies too. I even signed up to OpenShift preview awhile back (which I liked, actually) but you'd still need to do some provisioning and monitoring, meaning spending time on admin stuff and less on your product/service/whatever it is.

Thanks again!

Alex.

> channel (e.g. appengine_premier_req...@google.com email address?)

>
>
> Thanks!
> Alex.
>
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[Kaan Soral]

How does the "the compensation for failure to meet the SLA is a refund of a portion of your monthly bill" work?

Is it manual? Do we have to monitor the app and if a counter-SLA situation occurs report it?

I am just wondering, since GAE is such a great product I never check logs etc, that's why I like GAE
Thanks in Advance

[alex]

It's in the "Customer Must Request Financial Credit" section of the SLA, though I've never had to go there because we've never had issues on that level so far.

[Kaan Soral]

Thanks for the information, I've never had issues too, but probably that's because I come from apache http server background

There were many topics like "outages","500 errors" a while ago, during one of them I also saw some occasional 500's, like 10% etc but if you don't use a third party service to monitor health  I guess it would be impossible to detect these.

It would be great if SLA perks were automatic

[alex]

You might want to check out proppy's log2bq app example, it's pretty neat and simple. You can basically take your logs and make Big Query ingest it (via Cloud Storage + Pipeline), and then do all sorts of queries (e.g. you could calc a % of 500 errors not resulted from your code, those described as covered by the SLA).

I guess in some rare cases it might happen that requests won't reach your app, not appearing in the logs that is. At that point, if it were happening frequently, I wouldn't even be here. At least, not as something commercial-related, for which you probably won't even need an SLA. But, again, I'm pretty much impressed with AE as a platform product, so I personally happy with how things currently are.