Google Draws a Line, Microsoft Stumbles

Google Announces New SLA

Google drew a line in the sand when it announced on January 14, 2011 some changes to its service level agreement (SLA). First, the SLA will no longer have an "out" for planned downtime. Customers will receive SLA credits for any downtime - planned or unplanned. Google claims to be the first major cloud provider to eliminate maintenance windows from its service level agreement.

Previously, Google did not count periods shorter than 10 minutes as downtime. That meant that even though short outages could add up to hours over a long enough period of time, the company had no obligation to compensate users. Google is ending that policy and will now credit users for any amount downtime, no matter how brief.

MS Upgrade as an Example of How Bad an Upgrade Can Go

This month’s botched upgrade to Hotmail by Microsoft is an example of one of the risks of cloud computing that I’ve written about in the past, but Microsoft took it to a whole new level. This article from InfoWorld is almost comical in cruel sort of way. It’s ironic that Microsoft was suggesting that people turn off other Micorosoft client side apps, like messenger to fix the issue. I doubt this was their vision for cloud computing. When I wrote about the risk of receiving an upgrade that you might not want or like, I wasn’t really talking about upgrades that actually start breaking things and turn into a nightmare for your support staff. This is an indication that a cloud service provider isn’t fully mature.