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That must be why Amazon's SLA is defined as follows[1] : If amazon loses more than 3 datacenters (only total loss of external connectivity for all of your inst

by iofj 11y ago

That must be why Amazon's SLA is defined as follows[1] : If amazon loses more than 3 datacenters (only total loss of external connectivity for all of your instances in an entire availability zone, or total loss of hard disk access, again only counts if all your instances completely lose hard disk/EBS access) for more than 45 minutes in a month you get 10% of what you pay as a voucher for future ec2 usage. If they lose it for more than 7 hours you get 30%. So no, Amazon, or at least their legal department, does not trust their own competency. Or at least, they're not willing to risk any revenue on that, but they're willing to give you a small future discount to encourage you to restart using the service. Oh and you only get that if you explicitly ask for it. If they lose your data on EBS/S3/Dynamo/..., you get nothing. So having any data exclusively on any Amazon service should be cause for getting fired, and this of course also means that using Dynamo for storing anything non-trivial is a big no-no from a disaster recovery standpoint. So I have to say, I would suggest you do not trust Amazon with either your data, nor with keeping your site online. Yes, historically their performance has been better than this, but ... This reads worse than the SLAs on internet connectivity from places like level3 and cogent (pay 10% less if they fuck up completely for more than 2 days). [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/

BookmarkSaver 11y ago
You completely tunneled on the wrong portions of what I was saying. For one thing, Amazon's "real" liability extends far beyond their SLA. Yes, their immediate financial compensation is small. But there are two things wrong with your conclusion here. First, that is not indicative of how much they "trust" the service. They are always going to take the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it? Second, if a company on AWS was severely impacted by a genuine Amazon screw-up, the compensation SLA is the least of Amazon's concerns. It would be like if UPS lost 20% of Amazon deliveries for one day. They wouldn't be nearly as concerned with the explicit liability of compensating Amazon for those deliveries, however much they guarantee for them contractually, they would be far more concerned with everyone immediately switch to another shipping company because they could no longer trust UPS. That is the motivation. Second, you've completely ignored the actual key points. For one thing, "Cloud" companies make their business by providing a stable service. You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures. That is a huge amount of statistical reliability. Compared to hiring your own IT department and cobbling together your own system, that is actually really good indicator. Second, the cost difference is potentially massive. Again, it is for similar reasons that shipping via UPS is a much better deal than shipping via your own private distribution network. You might have to still pay some people to handle your own inventory from its source (like you'd have to have some people to work on your system in the cloud) but you'd be taking advantage of a much larger, more efficient system instead of having to build and maintain your own.
- iofj 11y ago
  I think the original point I made stands. Hosting on Amazon's platform essentially means I risk my revenue on Amazon's uptime. Actually using their infrastructure like S3 means I don't just risk my revenue but actually get locked in. Amazon is not willing to do the same, according to their total crap SLA. That tells me a lot. And to top it all of, Amazon is famous for "eating" businesses of their customers : use their infrastructure to see how one of their customers do business, then take it over. So if it's all the same, I'd rather have a decent SLA. Furthermore this sounds a lot like Amazon's not in fact giving me anything. Your point is that they'll do the right thing because otherwise their customers would leave. Customers you said in the previous paragraph they give "the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it?". Sounds like they really care about customers doesn't it ? > You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures. I can get that guarantee at 1000 datacenters and colo providers, at least. Some of which have a decent SLA. But even among cloud IAAS, both Azure and Google provide both Amazon's guarantee, and better SLAs.
  - BookmarkSaver 11y ago
    Again, you are tunneling... I used Amazon as an example. If you actually read what I'm saying, about how Cloud businesses in general depend on meeting their guarantees and not screwing over businesses, how their superior quality is because of scale and specialization, how they are reliable because one failure would doom them and they haven't failed yet, you could see that this has nothing to do with Amazon at all. You keep arguing that Amazon is a bad provider. So what? I was never interested in that at all. I'm not comparing them to Azure or Google or the supposed "1000 datacenters and colo providers" you seem to know of. I don't care who is better or worse, I was talking about using cloud services in general. Pay attention to the topic, pay attention to what my arguments were. Amazon's SLA is utterly irrelevant to anything, what are you even trying to convince me of? None of anything you've said is remotely relevant to my point. It's like arguing about whether Ford or Toyota makes better hybrids in a discussion about whether electric cars are a good idea, I just don't care.

by iofj 11y ago

BookmarkSaver 11y ago

You completely tunneled on the wrong portions of what I was saying. For one thing, Amazon's "real" liability extends far beyond their SLA. Yes, their immediate financial compensation is small. But there are two things wrong with your conclusion here. First, that is not indicative of how much they "trust" the service. They are always going to take the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it? Second, if a company on AWS was severely impacted by a genuine Amazon screw-up, the compensation SLA is the least of Amazon's concerns. It would be like if UPS lost 20% of Amazon deliveries for one day. They wouldn't be nearly as concerned with the explicit liability of compensating Amazon for those deliveries, however much they guarantee for them contractually, they would be far more concerned with everyone immediately switch to another shipping company because they could no longer trust UPS. That is the motivation. Second, you've completely ignored the actual key points. For one thing, "Cloud" companies make their business by providing a stable service. You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures. That is a huge amount of statistical reliability. Compared to hiring your own IT department and cobbling together your own system, that is actually really good indicator. Second, the cost difference is potentially massive. Again, it is for similar reasons that shipping via UPS is a much better deal than shipping via your own private distribution network. You might have to still pay some people to handle your own inventory from its source (like you'd have to have some people to work on your system in the cloud) but you'd be taking advantage of a much larger, more efficient system instead of having to build and maintain your own.

iofj 11y ago
I think the original point I made stands. Hosting on Amazon's platform essentially means I risk my revenue on Amazon's uptime. Actually using their infrastructure like S3 means I don't just risk my revenue but actually get locked in. Amazon is not willing to do the same, according to their total crap SLA. That tells me a lot. And to top it all of, Amazon is famous for "eating" businesses of their customers : use their infrastructure to see how one of their customers do business, then take it over. So if it's all the same, I'd rather have a decent SLA. Furthermore this sounds a lot like Amazon's not in fact giving me anything. Your point is that they'll do the right thing because otherwise their customers would leave. Customers you said in the previous paragraph they give "the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it?". Sounds like they really care about customers doesn't it ? > You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures. I can get that guarantee at 1000 datacenters and colo providers, at least. Some of which have a decent SLA. But even among cloud IAAS, both Azure and Google provide both Amazon's guarantee, and better SLAs.
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago
  Again, you are tunneling... I used Amazon as an example. If you actually read what I'm saying, about how Cloud businesses in general depend on meeting their guarantees and not screwing over businesses, how their superior quality is because of scale and specialization, how they are reliable because one failure would doom them and they haven't failed yet, you could see that this has nothing to do with Amazon at all. You keep arguing that Amazon is a bad provider. So what? I was never interested in that at all. I'm not comparing them to Azure or Google or the supposed "1000 datacenters and colo providers" you seem to know of. I don't care who is better or worse, I was talking about using cloud services in general. Pay attention to the topic, pay attention to what my arguments were. Amazon's SLA is utterly irrelevant to anything, what are you even trying to convince me of? None of anything you've said is remotely relevant to my point. It's like arguing about whether Ford or Toyota makes better hybrids in a discussion about whether electric cars are a good idea, I just don't care.