Choose the right Azure services by examining SLAs and service lifecycle
linking:: AZ-900, Azure-Cost
What are service-level agreements (SLAs)?
A formal agreement between a service company and the customer. Each Azure service defines its own SLA. Azure services are organized by category.
| SLA Percentage | Downtime per week | Downtime per month | Downtime per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99 | 1.68 hours | 7.2 hours | 3.65 days |
| 99.9 | 10.1 minutes | 43.2 minutes | 8.76 hours |
| 99.95 | 5 minutes | 21.6 minutes | 4.38 hours |
| 99.99 | 1.01 minutes | 4.32 minutes | 52.56 minutes |
| 99.999 | 6 seconds | 25.9 seconds | 5.26 minutes |
A service credit is the percentage of the fees you paid that are credited back to you according to the claim approval process.
Free products typically donāt have an SLA.
Azure status provides a global view of the health of Azure services and regions. If you suspect thereās an outage, this is often a good place to start your investigation.
Typically, you need to file a claim with Microsoft to receive a service credit. If you purchase Azure services from a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner, your CSP typically manages the claims process.
Define your application SLA
A workload is a distinct capability or task thatās logically separated from other tasks, in terms of business logic and data storage requirements. Each workload defines a set of requirements for availability, scalability, data consistency, and disaster recovery.
Combine SLAs to compute the composite SLA
The process of combining SLAs helps you compute the composite SLA for a set of services. Computing the composite SLA requires that you multiply the SLA of each individual service.
Access preview services and preview features
The service lifecycle defines how every Azure service is released for public use.
Every Azure service starts in the development phase. In this phase, the Azure team collects and defines its requirements, and begins to build the service.
Next, the service is released to the public preview phase. During this phase, the public can access and experiment with it and provide real-world feedback. Your feedback helps Microsoft improve services. More importantly, providing feedback gives you the opportunity to request new or different capabilities so that services better meet your needs.
After a new Azure service has been validated and tested, itās released to all customers as a production-ready service. This is known as general availability (GA).