What types of service-level agreements are cloud vendors providing?
Cloud vendors typically guarantee at least 99% uptime, but the ways in which that is calculated and enforced differ significantly. Amazon EC2 promises to make “commercially reasonable efforts” to ensure 99.95% uptime. But uptime is calculated on a yearly basis, so if Amazon falls below that percentage for just a week or a month, there’s no penalty or service credit. GoGrid promises 100% uptime in its SLA. But as any lawyer points out, you have to pay attention to the legalese. GoGrid’s SLA includes this difficult-to-interpret phrase: “Individual servers will deliver 100% uptime as monitored within the GoGrid network by GoGrid monitoring systems.
