Comment by kordless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kordless | Hacker News Reader

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SLAs are an artifact of the current business model where you have compute resources and I buy them from you. If we alter that model slightly where everyone buys compute from everyone else, the need for SLAs disappears completely. It's not surprising such a model would carry an immense amount of trust for availability, given it would be difficult for everyone to be 'down' all at once.

The table listing the "confidence" levels of the providers is designed to impart a certain amount of trust on the end user. The provider is basically saying "you can trust me, not because you can see how I operate my network, but because I'm willing to put my money at risk through an escrow statement that is applied to all my customers". This isn't really useful to everyone as Sue's use case may have a high net worth and Bob's use case has a low net worth.

Thanks for the comment. I work at UpCloud so I'll chip in my 2c on the issue. Your description of "how much money providers are willing to risk" is a great way to approach this. While it doesn't probably give you the most universal view on redundancy - it is a good, comparative measure of how much companies are willing to risk if their services go down.

Building multi-cloud services is of course a way to try and avoid this, but I would say that this approach isn't very well adopted as of yet.

Having said that, those utilising cloud hosting services will need to balance their own risk levels with those of the companies they are looking at and find the best match. Another way to approach this is to ask; how much am I willing to risk my business for the benefit of this company offering me a cloud hosting service?

If we alter that model slightly where everyone buys compute from everyone else, the need for SLAs disappears completely

How long does failover take (and how reliable is it)? How much bandwidth is available for replication between your 3+ separate providers living in separate datacenters and cities, and how much does the latency for this slow your system down?

True fully-distributed systems are a Hard Problem. SLAs aren't an artifact of business models, so much as they (along with those business models) are a non-technical workaround for technical limitations.

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