In a good move for the industry Amazon finally (in the past two weeks or so) put an SLA into place for S3, the storage half of their cloud computing offering.

Yes there are caveats, and yes the services levels are not enterprise-grade, but ... at least they have something. And that's a start.

The announcement post is here, if you want the details, with a good summary post from Larry Dignan here.

Basically, if in a given month S3 is available less than 99.9% of the time you get a 10% refund for that month, if it's less than 99% of the time you get 25% back. I think the times are cumulative, so they can either be one big outage or a bunch of smaller ones. No word on how this will be measured, or who's observations will be sufficient to call S3 "down". All worth consideration and important to customers, but at least they're taking the first steps towards the inevitable.

Salesforce.com Holds Out
It is interesting to compare the posting of an SLA for S3 with the refusal of salesforce.com to do the same. I just find it really curious why Benioff and the rest of the folks at salesforce seem stuck in time on this point ... almost like they'd rather paraphrase one of my favorite lines from an old Bogart movie, "SLAs? We don't need no stinkin' SLAs!"

It's easier for salesforce.com to hold out here because they're selling a whole application, while Amazon is vending more of a commodity - cloud storage - but how long will that really matter?

Is a simple, toothless "Trust Me" really enough anymore? For an enterprise? For anyone?

SLAs Will Happen ... Just About Everywhere
I think that SLAs are simply inevitable for enterprise SaaS offerings. While much has been written about how Google's use of "beta" and "labs" tags have lowered service level expectations universally (and they most definitely have), I tend to think that SLAs (both marketing-promise-type-SLAs and actually-delivered-SLAs) will become key areas of differentiation - especially where there is strong competition, and double-especially where there are subscription revenues.

It's simply inevitable. The real questions will be 1) whether to create a marketing-promise-SLA or an actually-delivered-SLA, 2) how to achieve the promised service levels, and perhaps more importantly, 3) how to achieve those in an affordable manner.

Note that a serious SLA doesn't leave too much room for error. To get a quick idea take a quick look at a handy "downtime conversion table" that Dan Farber posted.

App Fabrics Make Reliability Practical
My guess is that one reason why Salesforce.com is dragging their feet on an SLA is because they've taken rather traditional approaches to building out their commodity infrastructure. That's too bad, really, and just soooo unnecessary these days.

Think of the freedom of knowing that your computing substrate is simple, reliable, scalable ... by definition, by design ... in practice. That's the reality with application fabrics.

Technorati Tags: commoditization, SaaS, reliability, salesforce.com, SLA