Cloud Computing and the Truth About SLAs

I was looking through the program for an upcoming cloud computing conference and noted a number of sessions devoted to negotiating contracts and service level agreements (SLAs) with cloud providers. Reading the session descriptions, one cannot help but draw the conclusion that carefully crafting an SLA is fundamental to successfully using cloud computing.

The sessions described at length how they would help attendees with cloud computing topics like:

* Definitions of uptime, availability and performance
* Negotiation techniques in crafting an SLA
* What factors to include in an SLA: virtual machines availability, response times, network latency, etc.
* Negotiating penalties for SLA violation

Having sat through a number of discussions on the topic of SLAs, these session descriptions ineluctably brought to mind the following truth: SLAs are not about increasing availability; their purpose is to provide the basis for post-incident legal combat.

However, none of the sessions pointed this out. The session descriptions seem to suggest that clever SLA negotiation somehow ensures that one's applications will be immune to outages.

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Source: computerworld.com
By: Bernard Golden