Amazon Launches SLA’s for Web Services
Posted by Bob Warfield on October 8, 2007
Amazon has just announced an SLA policy for S3 that’s retroactive to October 1. Arthur Bergman on O’Reilly and others have been grumbling about Amazon’s lack of Service Level Agreement, although that doesn’t seem to have impacted the enthusiasm of a lot of startups using the services that I talked to. Nevertheless, it is evidence that they’re quite serious about encouraging others to use their Platform as a Service.
Some competitors, like Flexiscale, had been touting Amazon’s lack of SLA as a big advantage for their own services. Scratch one advantage!
The way the SLA works is that if Amazon doesn’t meet their commitment to 99.9% up time, you’re entitled to get back up to 25% of the fee for the month, depending on the details of what actually happened. That’s a pretty normal SLA, and it guarantees that Amazon can’t make a profit on the service (I doubt their margins are much higher!) unless they can keep to their SLA’s, so they’re properly motivated.
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SmugMug is happy, they use Amazon S3, although they haven’t been worried about the lack of SLA’s in the past.
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flexiscale said
Bob,
It’s nice to see Amazon catching us up *grin*. I’m glad they’ve released an SLA, it again gives more backbone to the ‘utility computing’ industry. I’ll await them releasing an SLA for EC2 though, which is where I have seen most criticism 🙂
Tony.
smoothspan said
Tony, fear not. We will see a lot of players across these various utility computing solutions, it won’t all go to Amazon!
In fact, I think one piece of software (preferably Open Sourced) that folks will be looking for after a while is some kind of layer that simplifies moving between services. That doesn’t look to daunting for EC2 and S3, and it would keep Amazon (and any others) honest while promoting a more competitive marketplace. This will benefit customers and smaller vendors by making it harder for the big guys to dominate everything.
Cheers,
BW
flexiscale said
Bob,
OVF, http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ovf_whitepaper_specification.pdf could be just what you are suggesting, we are certainly considering supporting it, and we are also working with people like Enomaly who are building a solution for migrating servers between platforms.
Tony.
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