Amazon announced on Monday the launch of an SLA, or Service Level Agreement, for the S3 web service. The lack of an SLA has always been cited as a “shortcoming” of S3, but I don’t know exactly how many customers have requested it. Enough for them to offer it I guess:
Basically, we commit to 99.9% uptime, measured on a monthly basis. If an S3 call fails (by returning a ServiceUnavailable or InternalError result) this counts against the uptime. If the resulting uptime is less than 99%, you can apply for a service credit of 25% of your total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99% but less than 99.9%, you can apply for a service credit of 10% of your S3 charges.
The SLA is effective as of October 1st, 2007. Jeff makes it sound like they had planned to have an SLA for a long time, but I’m not so sure that’s the case. Doesn’t matter now, they have one!
I think SmugMug’s Don MacAskill makes a good point:
Everything fails sometimes.
The SLA payment is rarely comparable to the pain and suffering your customers had to deal with.
Very true. From my perspective, the SLA isn’t a big deal. I hope it helps Amazon land some more customers though!
Read: Amazon
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