Service Level Agreements in the Cloud. Who Cares?
drus...@ca.ibm.com
Angel L. Diaz from IBM, on the importance of a Service Level
Agreements (SLA) for your Cloud Services (http://www.wired.com/
cloudline/2011/12/service-level-agreement%E2%80%99s-in-the-cloud-who-
cares/).
The article talks about some of the pitfalls of not having a SLA and
potential considerations you need to take into account to minimize the
risks of adopting cloud as an extension of your IT shop.
It should also be noted that the Cloud Standards Customer Council
(http://www.cloud-council.org/) just launched a new work group to
develop the Service Level Agreement Cookbook. This effort will be a
deep dive into the elements of a SLA and to provide an example of a
SLA for use by both cloud consumers and cloud providers.
Add your voice and your requirements to the SLA Cookbook activities by
joining the Cloud Standards Customer Council (http://www.cloud-
council.org/membership-application.htm) and the SLA Work group.
Dave
Luke S. Crawford
> The article talks about some of the pitfalls of not having a SLA and
> potential considerations you need to take into account to minimize the
> risks of adopting cloud as an extension of your IT shop.
While I agree that in a perfect world, a SLA should set reasonable
expectations, from what I've seen? For most SLAs, the penalties are
so weak that it's in the service providers best interest to set an
unrealistically high uptime percentage and then pay out to the few
people that bother to ask for it when the inevitable problems occur.
Even in the (very rare) case where a SLA is a large percentage of what
the customer pays a provider, that is usually not very much compared to
what that customer loses from being down.
In my industry, it's fairly common to see SLAs in the range of 99.9, or
even 99.99%, which is completely unrealistic for a VPS hosted
on standard server hardware without any sort of cross-chassis
redundancy. But the payout? if you complain, they refund you for the
time you were down, which is usually a very small amount of money, which
makes the thing quite realistic for the provider, but it means that you
learn nothing by comparing one provider's 99.9 to another provider's 99.99.
I don't think this is a fixable problem. The fact is that the difference
between what you pay for hosting and the cost of that hosting going down is
so great that no business ISP can afford to fully compensate all it's
customers for the cost of being down for any appreciable period of
time.
For this reason? I largely ignore SLAs, because as far as I can tell,
they don't set expectations. they are marketing tools, with very little
connection to reality.
--
Luke S. Crawford
http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept
http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid.