There is a dirty little secret when it comes to cloud SLAs, managed hoster ServInt says.
Many SLAs are only good if the customer pays for extra capacity. “Cloud service providers that require additional ‘availability zone’ purchases effectively offset any compensation their customers might receive in the event of an outage,” ServInt says.
In contrast, ServInt SLAs don’t demand the buying of unneeded capacity. Instead it “guarantees that all data center infrastructure under its control will be available 100 percent of the time, and that the servers used to host its Jelastic customers will be available 99.9 percent of the time. Furthermore, ServInt offers a 100 percent availability guarantee for any ServInt infrastructure required to contact its technical support group,” the company reported.
One of ServInt’s main tools is the Jelastic auto-scaling cloud hosting platform from Jelastic, Inc., a PHP and Java server hosting system sold as Platform as a Service (PaaS) to hosting providers like ServInt.
The new SLA covers server uptime and guaranteed performance of data center infrastructure.
“We are very proud to be one of the only hosting companies to offer the exact same service-level guarantees for our auto-scaling cloud as we do for our VPS and dedicated server offerings,” said ServInt COO Christian Dawson. “Many of today’s auto-scaling service providers offer SLAs that are both underwhelming in the compensation they offer, and unfair in the additional cloud resources they require customers to purchase.”
Dawson concluded, “With ServInt’s 99.9996 percent historical uptime, we are able to not only offer our Jelastic customers the same SLA guarantees our VPS and dedicated customers enjoy – we are also able to make the SLA better for all our customers, regardless of platform.”
Gartner agrees that cloud SLAs aren’t always worth the paper they’re written on, at least when it comes to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), one level lower on the cloud stack than PaaS.
“Unfortunately, cloud IaaS SLAs can readily be structured to make it unlikely that you’ll ever see a penny of money back – greatly reducing the provider’s financial risks in the event of an outage,” wrote Gartner’s Lydia Long this past winter in a blog posting “Cloud IaaS SLAs can be meaningless.”
Long is not impressed with AWS SLAs or the more recently announced HP cloud SLA.
“AWS measures availability over the course of a year, rather than monthly, like other providers (including HP) do. This is AWS’s hedge against a single short outage in a month, especially since even a short availability-impacting event takes time to recover from – 99.95 percent monthly availability only permits about 21 minutes of downtime; 99.95 percent yearly availability permits nearly four and a half hours of downtime, cumulative over the course of the year,” she explained.
So what’s better than an SLA? Insurance. “Customers should expect that the likelihood of a meaningful giveback is basically nil. If a customer needs to, say, mitigate the fact he’s losing a million dollars an hour when his e-commerce site is down, he should be buying cyber-risk insurance,” Long argued.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
