How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
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Re: How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
#2SLAs are an artifact of the current business model where you have compute resources and I buy them from you. If we alter that model slightly where everyone buys compute from everyone else, the need for SLAs disappears completely. It's not surprising such a model would carry an immense amount of trust for availability, given it would be difficult for everyone to be 'down' all at once.
The table listing the "confidence" levels of the providers is designed to impart a certain amount of trust on the end user. The provider is basically saying "you can trust me, not because you can see how I operate my network, but because I'm willing to put my money at risk through an escrow statement that is applied to all my customers". This isn't really useful to everyone as Sue's use case may have a high net worth and Bob's use case has a low net worth.
Re: How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
#3SLAs are an artifact of the current business model where you have compute resources and I buy them from you. If we alter that model slightly where everyone buys compute from everyone else, the need for SLAs disappears completely. It's not surprising such a model would carry an immense amount of trust for availability, given it would be difficult for everyone to be 'down' all at once. The table listing the "confidence…
Thanks for the comment. I work at UpCloud so I'll chip in my 2c on the issue. Your description of "how much money providers are willing to risk" is a great way to approach this. While it doesn't probably give you the most universal view on redundancy - it is a good, comparative measure of how much companies are willing to risk if their services go down.
Building multi-cloud services is of course a way to try and avoid this, but I would say that this approach isn't very well adopted as of yet.
Having said that, those utilising cloud hosting services will need to balance their own risk levels with those of the companies they are looking at and find the best match. Another way to approach this is to ask; how much am I willing to risk my business for the benefit of this company offering me a cloud hosting service?
Re: How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
#4Cute. People guaranteeing 100% uptime. They should run for political office with ideals so peachy and clean.
Re: How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
#5Cute. People guaranteeing 100% uptime. They should run for political office with ideals so peachy and clean.
Thanks for the comment! A 100% SLA is actually a promise of future uptime. Nobody can of course guarantee their uptime, no matter what the SLA percentage. Thus, the company includes compensation in the agreement if the service level is not met. All this of course is decided based on historical data and what makes business sense for the company, ie. how much money are they willing to lose if their services go down.
Re: How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
#6I like my cloud hosting provider to take redundancy seriously, AND take redundancy seriously.
Re: How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
#7Cute. People guaranteeing 100% uptime. They should run for political office with ideals so peachy and clean.
Thanks for the comment! A 100% SLA is actually a promise of future uptime. Nobody can of course guarantee their uptime, no matter what the SLA percentage. Thus, the company includes compensation in the agreement if the service level is not met. All this of course is decided based on historical data and what makes business sense for the company, ie. how much money are they willing to lose if their services go down.
Would you buy a car that guaranteed to never break down? Do you not understand how ridiculous a 100% uptime claim is?
I don't even consider companies stupid enough to put out a blurb like that.
Re: How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
#8Strong SLAs are nice, but wouldn't the best measure be historical outages as a percentage of whole infrastructure uptime? For most application, receiving compensation for an SLA breach is negligible compared to the cost of an outage to the customer.
One hour of downtime for an application paying $20,000/month for cloud services is worth $27.78. Even with a 100x multiplier the customer would be due a check/credit for $2,778. Given the choice, I'm sure most rational businesses would prefer the uptime over the credit. Perhaps someone running a company with similar cloud service bills could chime in.
Re: How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
#9I know they're not the same, or even the same target market and demographic.. but can anyone explain why a VPS host like linode can manage to keep my VPS up for >6 months without reboot, while AWS or Azure can barely manage 1 month?
I know the whole "you're suppose to use availability sets for redundancy" or equivalent speak.. but there are a lot of times when this just is not possible, not to mention potentially doubling the cost when you do this
Re: How Seriously Does Your Cloud Hosting Provider Take Redundancy?
#10Just suffered my first app down for a few hours after 460+ days of uptime. The cause was SSD read errors, which trigger ext4 journaling errors and Linux turn fs into read only mode. From that point on the app failed because logging api failed.
Just curious, does your SLA cover such outage case? My service provide said everything is normal from their POV which is kind of true.