Gartner: Amazon, HP cloud SLAs are "practically useless"

Gartner analyst Lyida Leong says cloud market leader AWS also has one of the worst SLAs, but HP's new offering is giving it a run for its money

Amazon Web Services, which Gartner recently named a market-leader in infrastructure as a service cloud computing, has the "dubious status of 'worst SLA (service level agreement) of any major cloud provider'" analyst Lydia Leong blogged today, but HP's newly available public cloud service could be even worse..

HP launched the general availability of its HP Compute Cloud on Wednesday along with an SLA. Both AWS and HP impose strict guidelines in how users must architect their cloud systems for the SLAs to apply in the case of service disruptions, leading to increased costs for users.

AWS's, for example, requires customers to have their applications run across at least two availability zones (AZ), which are physically separate data centers that host the company's cloud services. Both AZs must be unavailable for the SLA to kick in. HP's SLA, Leong reports, only applies if customers cannot access any AZs. That means customers have to potentially architect their applications to span three or more AZs, each one imposing additional costs on the business. "Amazon's SLA gives enterprises heartburn. HP had the opportunity to do significantly better here, and hasn't. To me, it's a toss-up which SLA is worse," Leong writes.

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Leong does note that AWS has voluntarily refunded customers impacted by major downtime events even when the SLA did not require it.

Not all IaaS cloud SLAs are as bad as AWS and HP, she concludes. "The norm in the IaaS competition is actually strong SLAs with decent givebacks, that don't require you to run in multiple data centers," she writes. Dimension Data, for example, has a per-VM SLA with 100% uptime. That compares to a 99.95% uptime guarantee from AWS and HP, which only kicks in after at least five minutes of an outage. AWS and HP also have caps of how much of a percent of a customer's bill can be refunded during a downtime, whereas Dimension Data will refund up to 100%.

HP did not immediately provide a comment in response to Leong's claims.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

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