Nice Teeth

Some of the commentary about the recent Amazon "Cloud" has focused on the reliability of cloud offerings, and their aggressively high availability Service Level Agreements (SLA).  Just for reference, the Microsoft Azure SLA is 99.9%, and  Amazon’s availability SLA happens to be 99.95%

Didn't see that one coming

The interesting thing about an SLA is that it doesn't make the service, or its servers, more reliable, it just specifies penalties and/or contract options for when the services become unreliable unavailable.  To go with their aggressive promises, the SLA usually provides creative definitions for “available” to help ensure the SLA is met, e.g., if the service drops half your connections, it’s still available, and you’re Simply Out of Luck

If a company actually uses its data to make money, the SLA doesn't fund the enterprise while the service is unavailable.  And the SLA typically doesn’t cover service degradation, just the creatively defined “availability.”  It also doesn’t manage or repair your tarnished reputation with your customers or your business.

Want to bet your reputation, and that of your organization on the cloud?  It’s probably a good bet, since you’re likely not getting 99.9% uptime from your own servers.  But be prepared when that .1% kicks your reputation in the teeth.