It didn’t take too long for the blogosphere to get enough pressure on Microsoft for it to take the NDA language off of the Azure cloud storage service SLA website.  Two days after I blogged, the topic was picked up by The Register (here) and blogged about here by Roger Jennings at Oakleaf Systems.  Blogger and consultant Preston de Guise picked up the topic a couple of days later.

It’s great to see Microsoft take the chains off of its SLA documentation, but I do have one more request (and I can talk about it now that the NDA is no longer in place).  The SLA is pretty straightforward – Microsoft offers service credits if its uptime falls below 99.9%.  But it is difficult to determine the exclusions, so I ask Microsoft – please provide a pointer within this document to the “technical documentation” to which the SLA refers!  I have searched the site and can’t find it anywhere.  Here’s what I am referring to, directly from the now public SLA, I highlighted the reference with bold font:

“Total Storage Transactions” are all the storage transactions in a given time interval (initially set at one hour) for a subscription, with a few notable exceptions.  Examples of excluded transactions include pre-authentication failures, transactions that are throttled based on suspicion of abusive behavior, authentication failures, attempted transactions for accounts over their prescribed quotas, creation or deletion of containers, tables or queues, or clearing of queues.  These exceptions do not count toward either Total Storage Transactions or Failed Storage Transactions.  Please refer to our technical documentation for further information regarding Total Storage Transactions.

There are other spots where Microsoft refers to the technical documentation for further information, including where it refers to defining failed storage transactions as “Transactions not processed within the time period specified in our technical documentation.”

Microsoft – thank you, you took a big giant step forward, but there is a little more work to do to finish up, the SLA is good, but not complete!

Related posts:

1. Shhhhh… Microsoft Azure Cloud Storage SLA
2. Cloud Storage Data Availability
3. Cloud Storage Enablement: Key to Commercial Cloud Storage Adoption
4. Cloud Storage to the Rescue

Tags: Cloud Storage, Microsoft, SLAs