Comments on: Guarantees, SLAs, and Hollow Promises http://kohari.org/2009/12/07/guarantees-slas-and-hollow-promises/ Rambling and occasional wisdom from Nate Kohari Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:45:06 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Michael Giagnocavo http://kohari.org/2009/12/07/guarantees-slas-and-hollow-promises/comment-page-1/#comment-2737 Michael Giagnocavo Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:03:31 +0000 http://kohari.org/?p=500#comment-2737 Any proper SLA will have stronger penalties than just a 1:1 discount. While the first 30 minutes of downtime might mean no discount, every half hour or so after that should be a pretty significant penalty. If the service was down for 8 hours, much of the bill could be erased. But you're absolutely right that a 1:1 discount means nothing, and that's why a some companies offer a "100%" SLA for _certain_ types of customers. More interesting (for any hosted service) is what the actual failover, backup and disaster recovery plans are. For example, if the datacenter messes up and fries your database, how much data loss is expected? Are there fully offline backups so that if the servers were hacked and all online data deleted there'd still be some recovery? Anyways, for a lot of services, this is just marketing. Customers aren't in a position to judge or verify such safeguards even if they wanted to -- they're just gonna have to decide if they trust the company or not. So the company puts up on its website "Don't worry everything's in redundant datacenters protected by quad layer offensive firewalls" and so on... Any proper SLA will have stronger penalties than just a 1:1 discount. While the first 30 minutes of downtime might mean no discount, every half hour or so after that should be a pretty significant penalty. If the service was down for 8 hours, much of the bill could be erased. But you’re absolutely right that a 1:1 discount means nothing, and that’s why a some companies offer a “100%” SLA for _certain_ types of customers.

More interesting (for any hosted service) is what the actual failover, backup and disaster recovery plans are. For example, if the datacenter messes up and fries your database, how much data loss is expected? Are there fully offline backups so that if the servers were hacked and all online data deleted there’d still be some recovery?

Anyways, for a lot of services, this is just marketing. Customers aren’t in a position to judge or verify such safeguards even if they wanted to — they’re just gonna have to decide if they trust the company or not. So the company puts up on its website “Don’t worry everything’s in redundant datacenters protected by quad layer offensive firewalls” and so on…

]]> By: jmorris http://kohari.org/2009/12/07/guarantees-slas-and-hollow-promises/comment-page-1/#comment-2724 jmorris Sat, 12 Dec 2009 03:30:23 +0000 http://kohari.org/?p=500#comment-2724 "In order to support a strong SLA, a company is forced to do things like set up hot backup servers, clustering, with redundancy in power and network – not to mention write some sort of instrumentation to determine how long the system was actually down (with redundancy, in case that system goes down)." This is the _reason_ customers expect the SLA...when you commit to an SLA, you tell the customer "Hey, we have committed to 99.99% uptime and we have (committed to) the infrastructure to prove it." Now, I understand what you are saying here and I agree, however I am a developer and my set of requirements differ from that of operations. For them, not having an SLA may be deal-breaker, since they are the one's that get pinged at un-godly hours when a system fails or a user in another time zone cannot connect. “In order to support a strong SLA, a company is forced to do things like set up hot backup servers, clustering, with redundancy in power and network – not to mention write some sort of instrumentation to determine how long the system was actually down (with redundancy, in case that system goes down).”

This is the _reason_ customers expect the SLA…when you commit to an SLA, you tell the customer “Hey, we have committed to 99.99% uptime and we have (committed to) the infrastructure to prove it.”

Now, I understand what you are saying here and I agree, however I am a developer and my set of requirements differ from that of operations. For them, not having an SLA may be deal-breaker, since they are the one’s that get pinged at un-godly hours when a system fails or a user in another time zone cannot connect.

]]> By: Todd Price http://kohari.org/2009/12/07/guarantees-slas-and-hollow-promises/comment-page-1/#comment-2721 Todd Price Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:17:22 +0000 http://kohari.org/?p=500#comment-2721 I love your reasoning. It makes your company more trustworthy in my opinion than it would be if it offered SLAs. I love your reasoning. It makes your company more trustworthy in my opinion than it would be if it offered SLAs.

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