This week I decided to continue with the topic of our homework, Service-Level Agreements (SLA). According to our textbook a service-level agreement outlines the expected level of service a customer can expect to receive from a service provider, the metrics used to measure said service, and the roles and responsibilities of both the service provider and the customer. It serves as an intermediary between the cloud service provider and the client organization.
According to an article by Wired, there is confusion about the importance of SLAs. In addition to setting expectations for companies, an SLA also acts as a guide for handling potential problems. Ironically the article addresses an outage by Amazon EC2 (which I discussed in my homework assignment). Amazon had an outage in April 2011 that was almost four days long, but because of the wording in the SLA, their agreements were not technically breached.
Wired's Lessons that have been learned with SLA's:
1. Read your cloud provider’s SLA very carefully
2. Get technical staff involved to validate SLAs against common outage scenarios
3. Have contingency plans in place to support worse case scenarios
The bottom line is that an SLA is necessary if you're going to do business in the cloud. I really liked how Wired broke down the importance of an SLA when they said "Most people require a blueprint for architects and contractors to start building a new home and similarly would expect a new car to come with a warranty. An SLA serves as both the blueprint and warranty for cloud computing".
Source:
http://www.wired.com/2011/12/service-level-agreements-in-the-cloud-who-cares/
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