Question

Availability Rate Metric

The overall availability of an IT resource is usually expressed as a percentage of up-time. For example, an IT resource that is always available will have an up-time of 100%.

• Description – percentage of service up-time

• Measurement – total up-time / total time

• Frequency – weekly, monthly, yearly

• Cloud Delivery Model – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

• Example – minimum 99.5% up-time

Perform a comparison between the different services provided by the cloud providers (Google GCP, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS) state: what cloud delivery model each cloud provider presents and what are the published availability rate metric for each provider.

Answer 1

Comparison between different services provided by cloud providers- Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in terms of cloud delivery model/s each cloud provider presents and what the published availability rate metric for each provider are:

Availability Rate Metric in regard to the overall availability of an IT resource expressed as a percentage of up-time of the IT resource always being available will have an up-time of the percentage as mentioned below for each of the cloud providers:

All three of the cloud providers present all three cloud delivery models- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS).

Google Cloud Platform (GCP);
* Description: percentage of service up-time. Below are the Service Level Objective (SLO) for some of the services in percentages:
AI Platform Training and Prediction: >= 99.5% monthly uptime percentage.
App Engine: At least 99.95%.
Cloud CDN: at least 99.95%
Cloud Filestore: At least 99.9%
Cloud Functions: >= 99.5%
Cloud Identity: At least 99.9% of the time in any calendar month.
Cloud Dedicated and Partner Interconnect: From 99.9% to 99.99%.
Cloud Storage: From 99.0% to 99.95%.
Compute Engine: From 99.5% to 99.99%.
Identity Platform: At least 99.95%.

* Measurement: total up-time / total time. The total number of minutes in a particular month, minus or subtracting the number of minutes of downtime experienced from all downtime periods in the same month, divided by the total number of minutes in the month.
* Frequency: Monthly uptime percentage.
* Cloud Delivery Model: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
* Example: A minimum of 99.5% up-time.

Microsoft Azure
* Description: percentage of service up-time. Their Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Availability Rate Metric is based on their commitments for uptime and connectivity. Microsoft Azure services provide an SLA starting from at least or minimum of 99.5% to 99.999%, depending on a specific service.
Below are some of the SLAs or Availability Rate Metric of some of the Microsoft Azure services against their SLAs in percentage:
Azure Active Directory: At least 99.9% availability.
Azure Active Directory B2C: At least 99.9% availability.
Azure Active Directory Domain Services: At least 99.9% availability.
Azure Active Directory Domain Services: At least 99.9%.
Azure Analysis Services: At least 99.9%
API Management: At least 99.9% and up to 99.95% of the time.
App Service: 99.95% of the time.
Application Gateway: At least 99.95% of the time.
Azure Firewall: From 99.95% to 99.99% of the time.
Azure Backup: At least 99.9% availability.
Cognitive Services: At least 99.9% of the time.
Content Delivery Network (CDN): At least 99.9% of the time.
Cloud Services and Virtual Machines: From 99.9% to 99.95% of the time.
Azure DDoS Protection: At least 99.99% of the time.
Azure DNS: At least 99.99% of the time.
Azure ExpressRoute: A minimum of 99.95%.
Azure Functions: 99.95% of the time.
HDInsight: At least 99.9% of the time.
Load Balancer: 99.99% of the time.
Media Services: 99.9% availability.
Mobile Services: 99.9% availability.
Azure Database for MySQL: At least 99.99%
SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances: At least 99.99% of the time.
Azure Site Recovery: At least 99.9% availability.
Azure SQL Database: From 99.95% to 99.995%.
Storage Accounts: At least 99.99%.
Traffic Manager: At least 99.99% of the time.

* Measurement: total up-time / total time. Measured monthly.
* Frequency: Availability for all Azure services is calculated in a monthly frequency, over a monthly billing cycle.
* Cloud Delivery Model: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
* Example: Minimum of 99.5% up-time to 99.999%, depending on a specific service.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
* Description: This percentage of service up-time is in terms of Amazon Compute Service Level Agreement (SLA) policy governing the use of the Included Services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which in turn includes any Amazon Elastic Graphics, Amazon Elastic Inference, and Elastic IP Address resources that are purchased with the relevant Amazon EC2 instance(s); Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS); Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS); Amazon Fargate for Amazon ECS (Amazon Fargate). This is the general service commitment for the Included Services with a monthly uptime percentage of at least 99.99%.

* Measurement: total up-time / total time. Monthly uptime percentage is calculated subtracting from 100% the percentage of minutes during the month when any of the above mentioned Included Services was unavailable.
* Frequency: Monthly
* Cloud Delivery Model: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
* Example: Uptime Percentage of at least or minimum 99.99%.

Any of the cloud provider not meeting the SLA for the availability of a mentioned cloud service, they would provide certain credit applied to their customers' accounts accordingly as agreed upon based on certain and reasonable calculations.