On Friday, Amazon's S3 online storage service went down for awhile. Many different online services now use S3 as a way to distribute content and store media online, and everywhere S3 is used - things didn't work for awhile this morning.
Is this an unacceptable failure of an automated business process? Or should we just accept it as the normal behavior for the web? Clearly a service like 37s Basecamp can't ensure that S3 stays up, because they have no control over any of Amazon's services. But their paying customers were nonetheless compromised when Amazon's service went down.
Wikipedia defines a Service Level Agreement as an agreement between parties that defines a "level of service" in terms such as percentage of uptime, power uptime etc. It has its roots in agreements between telecom companies and their corporate customers.
As more and more mission critical business is moved over to online services that themselves may outsource functionality to other parties, the question of reliability comes up. Where is the assurance that the third party will be there when you really need them? It was these kinds of questions that led to SLAs in the first place.
SLA-backed web services could be viewed as premium - something that you pay an additional amount, in order to ensure that the vendor is investing in the infrastructure to ensure the required level of service. Vendor's could look at SLA-backed service as a potential profit center.
Labels: business, WAX
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