"Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location."
That's the spec that everyone was building to, but that isn't what is happening. Of course you're right, multiple AZs can fail at the same time, but I read the above as saying that they should fail independently/coincidentally (until the entire Region fails).
Even if Amazon breach their SLA, I think they only have to refund 10% of one month's bill per year - i.e. a 1% discount. I suspect they'd make a good profit even if they paid out a full 10% refund every month.
Unless an SLA is accelerated - i.e. >100% refund - I don't think it's worth taking particularly seriously.
Of course if an SLA only guarantees 95% uptime, that's probably a big hint to design for failure!
It's like the hard disk maker that gives you a 1 year warranty vs a 5 year warranty... which one believes in their product more? :)
Suppose it's the same hard disk with a black sticker instead of a blue sticker. Drive with 1 yr warranty @ $100, 5 yr warranty @ $150, 20% additional failure rate over the extra 4 years, 50% redemption rate on failed drives. Cost per replaced drives = 20% * 50% * ($100 + $30 processing costs) = $13 = $37 profit.
Totally fictitious numbers to try to prove my point, of course :-) But as the SLA becomes increasingly low in value, the signalling value decreases in my book.
(Edit - fixed my math!)
One of them may be planning to be out of business, sell the HD business unit in 2 years, shove off the risk via financial wizardry, etc.
My guess is the great majority users will not RMA a dead hard drive after 4.5 years regardless of the stated warranty. Even if they did, it would only represent replacement with a future smallest-possible-capacity drive.
While agreeing it's not about the money it's about my site being up, I nevertheless was pretty shocked by this statement.
As far as I know we've heard nothing to the contrary from Amazon - it's totally possible that multiple AZs happened to fail independently/coincidentally. Perhaps it was simultaneous equipment failure? Or maybe one AZ failed and a sufficient number of people attempted to "fail over" to another AZ causing a chain reaction of failure?
The one bit of information we have suggests that the root cause was a networking issue, which suggests SPOF.
Now if you understand the SLA and still choose not to do cross-region deployments, then you've taken a cost/complexity vs uptime trade-off, which may well be right for you. quora.com probably is ok - who cares if its down for a day?
So anything that is beyond commercially reasonable is outside the SLA.
In truth, as with all businesses, the reputation for uptime weighs more heavily than the written contract. It will be interesting to see how the AWS people attempt to make amends.
It's kind of unfair to describe these as "weasel words" when it's unlikely that any decent lawyer would let them sign up to something that exposes them to more liability than this. Customers who are using any cloud service provider have to expect reasonable steps to maintain availability, not an absolute promise.
Edit: One more point. In the SLA, you'll find the following: “Region Unavailable” and “Region Unavailability” means that more than one Availability Zone in which you are running an instance, within the same Region, is “Unavailable” to you. What it implies is that if you do not spread across multiple Availability Zones, you will then have less than 99.95% uptime. So spreading across AZs should still reduce your downtime, just not beyond that 99.95%
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/