Microsoft Azure: SLA for single servers

    Relatively recently, in early August, I wrote that Microsoft is constantly working to improve the reliability of virtual machines in Azure.


    The other day there was news that the next, most important step was taken in this direction. Microsoft is finally introducing SLA for single virtual machines using Premium Data Warehouse.
    Today, we are announcing a new 99.9% single-instance availability SLA to better support applications that cannot easily scale beyond single VMs.

    Some details under the cut.

    The SLA theme for single machines is one of the main problems in communicating with the customer on the topic of migration to the cloud. This is not unique to Microsoft Azure. The exact same story with AWS. Cloud providers tell you - “Use cloud-ready applications and horizontal scaling. We can easily guarantee you an SLA for sets of several machines, if you designate for us that they are used by the same service, so that we can divide them into different equipment. ”The position is very clear and justified. However, not all applications give such an opportunity (let us leave aside the discussion that applications with outdated architecture are bad and you need to get rid of them anyway), and, in general, the customer is very nervous about the news that that his single virtual machines will not have a guaranteed SLA.

    The November Azure update gives such an SLA. True, with the caveat that this, at the moment, applies only to virtual machines all of whose disks are in Premium storage (an interesting way to promote this more expensive storage).
    To qualify for the single instance virtual machine SLA, all storage disks attached to the VM must be using premium storage

    The official SLA on the Azure portal has already been updated to version 1.3 in accordance with this news.

    Once I got the news about the introduction of SLA for single machines with Premium disks, now I just have to wait for a similar news (albeit with the worst SLA) for machines with disks on standard storages.

    NB It is important to note that SLA means Microsoft’s willingness to return part of the funds that you pay for the services you use, and not compensate you for losses incurred as a result of downtime.

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