Question

Describe what an SLA can contain and how it provides an organization with a level of control over its systems being hosted in a cloud computing model. Provide a specific example to support your ideas.

Answer 1

Description of what an SLA can contain and how it provides an organization with a level of control over its systems being hosted in a cloud computing model:

General overview and definition:

* SLA, in general, is the acronym for Service Level Agreement.

* It applies to almost anything in the world, in any line of business and industry, to any work, and the service provided by the, of course, the service provider to their clients, customers, users or end-users.

Importance:

* It is crucial, beneficial, productive, and useful to both, the service provider and their customers. In this case, since it is about cloud computing model, i.e, with the cloud service provider or a public cloud service provider say, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the organization (say, ABC company) whose systems are hosted in a cloud computing model with AWS to run their business and to provide their core business services to their customers.

* SLAs, in a way, regulates, administers, monitors, controls, manages, delivers, and supports the ABC company's business, business processes, and operations. In this scenario, we shall discuss the public cloud service provider (AWS) and the company (ABC). So, AWS is the cloud service provider and ABC is the customer of AWS.

Actual definition:

SLA is an agreement or contract signed between the service provider and its either internal or external customers. The contract defines, describes, mentions in figures, percentages, and documents what services the provider would offer and the service standards the provider is obligated and supposed to reach, achieve or meet per the policies and the agreement signed.

SLAs define and describe services' performance characteristics based on each one of their different metrics. So, they both sign contracts on general terms and conditions agreed upon.

From the customer's perspective i.e., in this case, the ABC company's (whose systems are hosted in a cloud computing model), SLA ensures, they get the service per the contract, it ensures the quality and quantity of the service the company is supposed to receive.

From the service's provider perspective, i.e., the cloud service provider, in this case, the AWS, SLAs ensure they manage the situations, operations, processes and meet customer expectations. They are accountable for any outages, or global outages, planned or unplanned maintenances, performance issues, and disrupting normal operations and business of their customer. SLAs make the service providers behave, be disciplined in their work, business, and the service they provide, making them a little bit scared of their customers, devoted, and dedicated to them, thus they taking care of their customers, their services, operations, and business in turn.

A specific example of how it supports the ideas:
All public cloud service providers are supposed to meet the SLAs per each one of their agreed-upon service quality and quantity they would provide to their customers (companies). These SLAs are in the range of 99%, 99.5%, 99.9%, 99.99, 99.999999999 to 100% depending on the service. For example, AWS provides 100% SLA for their DNS (Domain Name System) service they provide to their customer customers and individuals. Missing this condition or SLA, they would be responsible to compensate the same with their customers based on pre-decided polices.

Many times, these cloud service providers offer credits, service credits, refunds, and other complementary services to their customers for missing their SLAs.
AWS promises and offers 99.99 availability of their resources, infrastructure, and services. The service credits these cloud service providers offer range from 10% to 100%. These SLAs are measured monthly, and the uptime is calculated on a monthly basis against the signed upon SLAs.

Hence, each one of the services these cloud service provider offer to their customers come with its own specific SLAs.