Working with Service Level Agreements

Service Level Agreements (SLA) is mostly referred to as the contract you have with your service provider. Here`s some notes to have in mind if you actually should define and create your own SLA that you will offer to your customers and clients.

(In the early days of cloud computing, all SLAs were negotiated between a client and the provider. This has changed now, and today with the large utility-like cloud providers, the SLAs are mostly standardized until a client becomes a very large consumer of services)

Things to consider:

·         Response times/latency

·         Availability of a service (often referred to as uptime)

·         Warranties

·         Responsibilities of each party (very important)

·         Reliability of service components

If you plan to offer IaaS to your customers/clients, your responsibility will at least include hardware, virtualization/hypervisor/, servers and clusters (in other words, the entire Fabric) and the clients will have the responsibility related to the content within their VMs.