Comments on: Google’s Apps SLA Allows It To Minimize Downtime Of Gmail, Calendar And More

By: Gmail down et le modèle critiqué du SaaS? | .zoltán.jánosi.

Gmail down et le modèle critiqué du SaaS? | .zoltán.jánosi. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:32:37 +0000

[...] autre forme d’excuses. Ne cherchez pas de SLA pour les applications gratuites de Google, seules les versions payantes y ont droit. Mais quand même. On parle de millions [...]

By: SageLive, part 2: architecture, product and mobile | AccMan

SageLive, part 2: architecture, product and mobile | AccMan — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:45:19 +0000

[...] Google’s Apps SLA Allows It To Minimize Downtime Of Gmail, Calendar And More [...]

By: links for 2008-12-17 « Brent Sordyl’s Blog

links for 2008-12-17 « Brent Sordyl’s Blog — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:01:17 +0000

[...] Google’s Apps SLA Allows It To Minimize Downtime Of Gmail, Calendar And More Google’s Apps SLA may guarantee 99,9% uptime, but this little loophole makes it darn easy for the company to honor that. (tags: sla) [...]

By: Seventy One

Seventy One — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 08:38:52 +0000

Some folks like a conspiracy theory, but it’s a lot simpler than that.

This was really driven by engineers who do indeed believe in “don’t be evil”, who looked at some other companies’ incredible SLA promises and would have none of it, who want to spell out explicitly for customers the worst they’re signing up to, and who want to under-promise and over-deliver on expectations.

SLA terms are a surprisingly complicated business. Google’s gets to the meat of it within a few paragraphs. And when was the last time anyone remembers a “scheduled downtime” for GMail, also stated in the SLA?

The important thing is to look at what the company does to keep its customers happy, uptime, ROI, and all. Google has had a pretty good track record so far, if imperfect.

Notwithstanding some availability monitoring service providers that have a history of issuing news releases with the word “Google” in it. If it works for their business, more power to them

By: The PHA : links for 2008-12-07

The PHA : links for 2008-12-07 — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:41:53 +0000

[...] Google’s Apps SLA Allows It To Minimize Downtime Of Gmail, Calendar And More (tags: google techcrunch collaboration hosting) [...]

By: indir

indir — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:55:35 +0000

Google’s pay-for hosting service is pretty economical

By: Michael R

Michael R — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 02:15:06 +0000

It doesn’t mean that their SLA needs to be predatory. Sure, buyer beware, you should read the SLA to know what your getting into, but the language is not really all that clear, is it.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:32:44 +0000

You could do the same with 9.999 minutes and 0.001 seconds of uptime between them for 99.99% downtime. 21 hours isn’t a theoretical maximum in this doomsday scenario, total lack of access is.

I doubt Google has any malicious designs on this license wording. It’s likely to make it clear-cut whenever they have downtime or not… if a website drops out for 5 seconds and comes back, does that really count as downtime? Probably no one cares. Google is just defining a cut off point for this at 10 minutes before they would call it downtime.

By: collin

collin — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:05:06 +0000

i don’t think google apps is a free service — people (companies) contract google to create separate (local or remote) instances of gmail / docs for them to use for their business/organization.

By: Galvanick Lucipher

Galvanick Lucipher — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:50:57 +0000

Oh look, more whining from the entitlement generation. “I WANT FIVE NINES AND I WANT IT CHEAP!” Google’s pay-for hosting service is pretty economical. If you want five nines of uptime with a real SLA behind it, you can get it from other providers, but they, um, charge more for better service. Whodda thought?

By: Nguyen Hai-Nam

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:28:09 +0000

That’s something in every SLA, but even that, I think 10 mins duration is rather long. I don’t know if, beside “Downtime period”, how Google defines “downtime”. In some/many companies, it is defined as “no connection at all”, that means, all servers are down, or all network connections are down. If someone in Asia can use the service when a American can’t, it won’t be couned into “downtime”.

By: tooman

tooman — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:25:02 +0000

I agree with Tech Ninja, I think it’s ridiculous that people expect so much out of a _free_ service. You get what you pay for.

By: Anon

Anon — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:10:37 +0000

“Do No Evil”? I think you mean “Dont Be Evil”, and all SLAs have this clause.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:08:39 +0000

What ever happend to the slogan “Do No Evil”? I guess Google now has attorneys involved.

BTW, and had thousands of “temp workers” they can layoff and not have to claim they ever had layoffs or reports this extra workfoce (1/3 of the company staff) as employees to their stock holders. Glad I dumped their stock months ago, I can’t agree with their tatics.

By: Robin Wauters

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:38:13 +0000

Yes, 100% uptime is impossible. But 99,9% against 99,6% is a big difference.

By: IT’s About Uptime - The StackSafe Blog » Blog Archive » From the Gartner Data Center Conference: Impact of the Cloud

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:07:20 +0000

[...] offer, but its unlikely that the customer will get enough information to satisfy concerns. However, contractual remedies won’t protect a company from damage if the cloud computing vendor doesn’t deliver. Essentially, [...]

By: Jason M. Lemkin

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:42:10 +0000

Almost all SLAs seem to define uptime as net of “scheduled downtime” and also downtime of < x minutes.

There is validity to this approach — but also a clear fiction. We’ve taken the approach and just used Pingdom data at EchoSign electronic signature and show it going back 18 months at http://trust.echosign.com, warts and all.

That way, there is no debate.

By: What Ever

What Ever — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:52:10 +0000

Who in their right mind would give Google their code, above all the other tons of data we let them have about us.

By: Google Appsはサービスレベル契約上、Gmailなどのダウンタイムがハショれる

Google Appsはサービスレベル契約上、Gmailなどのダウンタイムがハショれる — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:38:18 +0000

[...] [原文へ] [...]

By: Tech Ninja

Tech Ninja — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:24:57 +0000

If any of you people can create a more robust + scalable web system than Google can, you have the right to talk shit about them.

Otherwise, you guys are just bunch of cynical turds.

By: Black Zedd

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:51:25 +0000

While i partly agree with most of the comments, this post reminds us that you can’t claim a 100% up-time when it’s not. Lying is an evil act indeed.

By: matt

matt — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:51:15 +0000

I’m actually amazed people believe that anything can have an uptime of 100%. It’ll be awhile before that’s the case as we see things like local network issues that prevent customers from accessing our services, provider issues at the colo affecting service, etc. In the colo scenario, we’ve actually seen some of the patterns outlined in the article — up for a few minutes, down for a few minutes, up again, etc. But, of course, you’d write your SLA to only take into account issues within your control, therefore a power outage knocks your whole colo out and technically you never violated your SLA as the issue didn’t reside with you, but with your colo. The other crafty thing companies do with SLAs is build a metric of how much, if any, they will credit. Most customers believe they’ll get a full month of credit, but in reality an outage of a few hours might only result in a few dollars worth of credit, not a full credit. Only rarely do companies credit the full bill and that’s when there’s a major issue and they have dozens of customers threatening to leave them.

-matt

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:43:26 +0000

Tony (upthread) nailed it. Google can offer a poor service and claim 100% uptime. This is very disengenuous – some might say, evil

Claiming 100% uptime when in actuality you are achieving 96-98% uptime is an out-and-out lie.

By: fb526581118

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:00:59 +0000

a theoretical loop hole, but one that google would never exploit…….not to this extent anyway.

I’m sure they’re pleased they can hide 99% of their downtime though as its probably for less than 10mins to they never have to declare it and keep the 100% uptime stat…sneaky.

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:47:34 +0000

While 9 minutes down and 1 up every 10 minutes is a very unlikely scenario, 9 minutes downtime three or four times in a day is VERY possible. That’s 27 minutes of downtime per day – which works out to 98% uptime. But even with that 2% downtime, google can still CLAIM 100%