Managing a cloud service outage

Keep your options open

Ultimately enterprises need to have the freedom of choice so they can choose a deployment model that meets their price and uptime requirements. At ERP Cloud News, we advocate customer choice with regards to the deployment of cloud technologies. Vendors who create cloud software that is built for a single cloud infrastructure promote vendor lock-in and vulnerability to issues like service outages. Customers should be able to move transparently between cloud vendors and on-premise deployment options. The last thing any business needs is to be locked-in to a provider that cannot deliver service.

Option 1: In-House

The option to maintain complex ERP software on your premises is not for every business. Often this requires specialized knowledge and expensive IT resources and is not guaranteed to do better than trusting the experts running a SaaS solution. The on-premise option does prevent an outage if your internet service is interrupted and people are not trying to access the system remotely.

Option 2: SaaS with a Service Level Agreement (SLA)

If you elect to outsource your deployment, you might be able to save significant money on IT resources and hassles associated with software upgrades. If you elect to go this route, we recommend getting a service level agreement (SLA) and verifying the procedures in place to recover from an outage.

Option 3: SaaS and on-premise

Businesses with large budgets and IT expertise, can implement SaaS with an on-premises backup solution. This will provide a rapid way to recover from a service outage, but will increase the cost and hassle of running and maintaining your system. Most likely you would not implement an instant-failover arrangement, but store data as well as a copy of the application on premise. This arrangement is not possible with SaaS providers that run a single multi-tenant version of their software.

Software vendor or service provider?

Traditionally, there has been a separation of software providers and service providers. As more software companies move to the cloud, the lines between the software provider and the service provider have been muddied. The role of the software developer has expanded to include maintaining an operating environment, managing upgrades, tracking bandwidth, providing storage, providing customer service, purchasing hardware, and providing backups.

Software companies may outsource some or all of these features to a service provider. Some software vendors purchase collocation space and manage everything else. Others purchase infrastructure from a provider such as Amazon or GoGrid (power, hardware, bandwidth) and manage the rest. Still others purchase a platform from a provider such as Microsoft Windows Azure and only manage their application.

As software vendors begin to take on service provider responsibilities, mistakes are bound to be made. Developing software and managing data centers require different skill sets.

This comment got us thinking, “What are the SLAs offered by some cloud providers?”

Cloud Provider SLAs

Before the cloud, service level agreements were part of the telecommunications and internet service provider world. Now that computing power and storage is being offered in the cloud, SLAs have been extended to cloud resources by providers such as Amazon and Microsoft Azure.

Amazon breaks its SLA into storage and compute. The S3 (storage) SLA includes 99.9% uptime during a monthly billing cycle. The service credit percentage is either 10% or 25%, depending on the percentage of uptime. The EC2 (compute) SLA includes 99.95% availability during a service YEAR. The service credit in this case is 10%. More details available on Amazon’s website.

The Microsoft Windows Azure SLA includes 99.95% uptime for Computing Connectivity and 99.9% uptime for Database availability, Storage availability, and Service availability. Financial penalties are made in the form of credits which are based on the percentage of downtime. More details available on Microsoft’s website.

Cloud Application SLAs

Cloud applications ride on top of the cloud providers, although in some cases, a single company serves as both the cloud provider and the application provider. In many cases, specifics of the financial penalties are difficult to find, so we have provided only a few examples.

Salesforce does not provide a SLA and has been criticized for not doing so.
Applicor provides SLA tracking via their website and a “financial guarantee”, but the terms of the financial guarantee are not immediately available. Side note: many Aplicor SLA features seem more representative of an internet provider than a software provider.
NetSuite provides 99.5% uptime per month and returns the monthly subscription fee if they fail to comply. This recent outage means a lot of customers may get a free month.
Acumatica provides 99.5% uptime per month and returns the monthly subscription fee if they fail to comply. Acumatica’s application runs on top of Windows Azure, so their SLA encompasses the Windows Azure SLA plus the application level SLA for their ERP software.

SLA Details

The simple measure of percentage uptime is frequently the basis for service level agreements. However, there are several factors which determine how this is computed and other things you should be concerned about. A few of these are listed below.

Downtime calculation period
Providers measure downtime differently. In Amazon’s case, the month (or year) is broken into 5 minute intervals. This

Credit or refund
Providers may issue a credit to your account for the next month’s service or issue a refund to a prior payment.

Scheduled downtime
Providers may exclude scheduled downtime from their SLA calculations. In this case, you need to learn the definition of scheduled downtime.

Latency and performance
If it takes 20 seconds to get a response from your service, is the service considered down or just slow? By several definitions, the service would still be considered up, although it is certainly not very usable.

Notification
Assume that service goes down for 45 minutes between 2am and 3am local time. If nobody was using the service from your company, are you still entitled to a credit?

The Future of SLAs

Well defined service provider and application provider SLAs are critical to the application of cloud services. As cloud services mature, service level agreements will become standardized and may represent the Five-nine’s that are offered by many telecom utilities today.