To close the loop on sla and availability I think it’s really important that MSP’s (especially on behalf of their customers) look under the hood of the cloud SLA. It’s not enough to ‘assume’ all SLAs are created equal.

I *think* it was Alan Macdonald who, during our presentations a couple weeks ago in Scottsdale, made a point of sorting the fine print of Gogrid’s “10,000%” SLA. A lot of the cloud SLA’s are smoke and mirrors and very few of them will extend to the network. I find this strange since the network is probably THE biggest component of cloud. I mean without it all of this is pretty much a non-starter, right?

I am sitting at Georgia Tech right now (cloudcamp Atlanta), which started with an expert panel general session. One of the big questions from the audience was cloud sla.

After a lot of wrangling with the audience, the panel yielded the answer to your blog post:

They concluded “if your expectation is to receive anything more than 3 nines availability, you shouldn’t use clouds like amazon and google.”

This is one of the most lucid conclusions I’ve heard in a long time…

Readers: An update … Amazon has cut its cloud prices.

Yes, we’re dovetailing with some of the popular cloud platforms out there. We work with Amazon, Nirvanix, Parascale & Caringo and will soon be on Azure too (and perhaps on Mosso – sorry, they’re now called the Rackspace cloud). And we’ve done some work with 6Fusion (above) too.

In our experience…

A lot of MSPs are interested/curious about using the cloud – in our use case, for providing online backup services. During their initial evaluation, many of them even fire up a few AMIs & some storage on Amazon – and have reported good results. However, only a subset of them (at this time) actually go ahead with running their backup business off the cloud. Why? I think there are a few reasons…

a) The unpredictability of the cost model. While calculable, it is still unpredictable since it cannot be pre-determined. John raised this in his comment and tools like his ‘Profiler’ seek to address exactly this issue.

b) They never wanted to, anyway: many people evaluating the cloud are doing so driven more by curiosity than business metrics. Once they’ve checked it out, they simply revert to what they’re more comfortable and familiar with – a hosted server.

c) Related to the business metrics point in our business context: A person starting an online backup business with just a few customers probably won’t see savings ‘to write home about’ at his scale of operation. As he scales up, and needs to cluster or load balance backup servers, or provision them on the fly, the benefits begin to accrue.

d) Expertise. Not all MSPs may have (or think they have)the requisite technical expertise. Though this barrier is progressively reducing, we have had smaller service providers comment that an Amazon deployment will probably be difficult for them to handle.

Anyway, we’re seeing increasing interest & curiosity – if that’s any barometer of future adoption. And we even created a video parody on the whole cloud hype. If you’d like an introduction to cloud computing & storage in a ‘rap song format’, please check it out at:

http://blogs.vembu.com/2009/10/cloud-cloud-maybe/

(shameless plug, albeit, some entertainment)

Lux

I’ve blogged about this SO many times on http://www.6fusion.wordpress.com, but I’ll say it again here in three succinct points:

1) Amazon an other related clouds are not geared for the enterprise. They are geared for web application developers and hobbyists looking for cheap startup costs and have nothing serious to migrate. Period.

2) The difference between someone that thinks they know cloud and someone that has actually SOLD cloud is the ability to answer the question: What does it cost? Ahmen, Richard Zuckerman. Thats why we created Profiler for our MSP partners. Been there, done that and cracked the nut.

3) Cloud is not about selling software subscriptions. Anyone that tells you they are in the cloud business and they try to sell you a software subscription (even vmware, folks), is not a cloud vendor. They are someone that can read a newspaper and realize cloud is all the buzz.

Here’s the pepsi challenge for MSPs: Pick three cloud vendors and ask each one what THEY are going to do for your business to help you grow your managed service practice, integrate with your billing models and help you launch new hosted products.

Develop a partnership with the vendor that is willing to put some skin in the game for you….