I’ve attended countless cloud presentations discussing vendor relationships and contract agreements. A common feature of these presentations is a discussion of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and how to define, negotiate and enforce it. I’ve always found this curious, but felt it was a relatively harmless, if not terribly, useful topic.
No longer. If you invest significant effort on a contractual SLA you’re not only wasting time, you’re focusing on the wrong thing. The SLA, if it ever made sense as a key contract topic, does so no longer. The traditional SLA is dead. Here’s why:
SLAs Are Pointless
People spend time on SLAs because they think they’ll make the cloud provider pay attention to availability. Guess what? They already spend time on availability and work really hard at it. Believing that your negotiation smarts are going to generate something above and beyond that from the provider is wrong. Outages happen and cloud providers respond as quickly as possible.