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I think it's great to check the SLA. However, there's enough wiggle room in the AWS SLA that I think this outage could continue for the rest of the month, and

I think it's great to check the SLA. However, there's enough wiggle room in the AWS SLA that I think this outage could continue for the rest of the month, and Amazon would still not owe a penny. I don't even know that the SLA covers this outage, because network connectivity isn't affected. Even if Amazon breach their SLA, I think they only have to refund 10% of one month's bill per year - i.e. a 1% discount. I suspect they'd make a good profit even if they paid out a full 10% refund every month. Unless an SLA is accelerated - i.e. >100% refund - I don't think it's worth taking particularly seriously. Of course if an SLA only guarantees 95% uptime, that's probably a big hint to design for failure!

bphogan 16y ago
Yeah but I don't care about getting my money back as much as I care about how much they claim to be down. It's like the hard disk maker that gives you a 1 year warranty vs a 5 year warranty... which one believes in their product more? :)
- justinsb 16y ago
  It's a good analogy and I certainly accept your point. It could just be a marketing thing though: Suppose it's the same hard disk with a black sticker instead of a blue sticker. Drive with 1 yr warranty @ $100, 5 yr warranty @ $150, 20% additional failure rate over the extra 4 years, 50% redemption rate on failed drives. Cost per replaced drives = 20% * 50% * ($100 + $30 processing costs) = $13 = $37 profit. Totally fictitious numbers to try to prove my point, of course :-) But as the SLA becomes increasingly low in value, the signalling value decreases in my book. (Edit - fixed my math!)
- marshray 16y ago
  It tells you very little. One of them may be planning to be out of business, sell the HD business unit in 2 years, shove off the risk via financial wizardry, etc. My guess is the great majority users will not RMA a dead hard drive after 4.5 years regardless of the stated warranty. Even if they did, it would only represent replacement with a future smallest-possible-capacity drive.
polynomial 16y ago
> here's enough wiggle room in the AWS SLA that I think this outage could continue for the rest of the month, and Amazon would still not owe a penny. While agreeing it's not about the money it's about my site being up, I nevertheless was pretty shocked by this statement.

bphogan 16y ago

Yeah but I don't care about getting my money back as much as I care about how much they claim to be down. It's like the hard disk maker that gives you a 1 year warranty vs a 5 year warranty... which one believes in their product more? :)

justinsb 16y ago
It's a good analogy and I certainly accept your point. It could just be a marketing thing though: Suppose it's the same hard disk with a black sticker instead of a blue sticker. Drive with 1 yr warranty @ $100, 5 yr warranty @ $150, 20% additional failure rate over the extra 4 years, 50% redemption rate on failed drives. Cost per replaced drives = 20% * 50% * ($100 + $30 processing costs) = $13 = $37 profit. Totally fictitious numbers to try to prove my point, of course :-) But as the SLA becomes increasingly low in value, the signalling value decreases in my book. (Edit - fixed my math!)
marshray 16y ago
It tells you very little. One of them may be planning to be out of business, sell the HD business unit in 2 years, shove off the risk via financial wizardry, etc. My guess is the great majority users will not RMA a dead hard drive after 4.5 years regardless of the stated warranty. Even if they did, it would only represent replacement with a future smallest-possible-capacity drive.

polynomial 16y ago

> here's enough wiggle room in the AWS SLA that I think this outage could continue for the rest of the month, and Amazon would still not owe a penny. While agreeing it's not about the money it's about my site being up, I nevertheless was pretty shocked by this statement.