SLA stands for Service Level Agreement. This is a formal agreement between the service provider and the customer. The Azure Cloud provides a set of SLAs based on various parameters that apply to Azure services. This page describes the purpose of the Azure SLA and the actions that may affect the SLA. This page also discusses the lifecycle of services in Azure. This redundancy includes the application itself and the underlying services and infrastructure. If Microsoft terminates support, Microsoft will provide 12 months` notice before ending support. This does not include the free service or previews. Private previews are usually the first version of a product. Customers are encouraged to try the service to provide feedback, understand if the service is needed, and help shape the future of the product. Support window – for the period during which a service feature or compatibility with a separate product or service is supported. Availability for all Azure services is calculated on a monthly billing cycle. Click here to download the SLA for most Microsoft Azure services.
The SLA for Active Directory is available here. If your application uses multiple services (Azure), you must review the SLA for each service. What do you think is the maximum expected downtime for the application in the following example? At the time of writing, only one Azure service has a 100% SLA. Azure DNS, which is at the heart of many services such as Azure AD. Microsoft guarantees that “valid DNS queries will receive 100% of a response from at least one Azure DNS name server.” Microsoft achieves this by offering four DNS servers in different regions with different top-level domains: .com, .net, org, and ns{x}-{xx}.azure-dns.net. To qualify for the 100% SLA, you must configure your application or service to use all four DNS servers. Each service or product follows a few phases or has a life cycle. Similarly, the service version of Azure is lifecycle-dependent. Azure State provides a holistic view of the health of Azure services and regions. If you suspect there is a breakdown, this is often a good place to start your investigation. It`s good to know about Azure SLAs. Service level agreements (SLAs) describe Microsoft`s commitments to availability and connectivity.
This article explains how Azure SLAs and service lifecycles are described. The Azure Service Level Agreement outlines Microsoft`s availability and connectivity commitments for individual Azure services. Each Azure service has its own SLA with associated terms, restrictions, and service credits. Some (free) services do not have SLAs, such as Azure DevTest Labs. Other services require specific configuration, such as virtual machines. The SLA starts at a low 95% for single-instance VMs with standard hard disks up to 99.99% for multi-instance VMs deployed in two or more Availability Zones in the same Azure region. The service lifecycle defines how each Azure service is shared for public use. There are three phases: private preview, public preview, and general availability. We guarantee that the Azure Cost Management service to view and manage your cross-cloud spend (currently cross-cloud is limited to AWS only) is available 99.9% of the time.
As a free service, AKS does not offer a financially secure service level agreement. We aim for at least 99.5% availability for the Kubernetes API server. The availability of agent nodes in your cluster is covered by the virtual machine SLA. For more information, see the virtual machine SLA. When a service goes into GA, it is in full production mode. It is fully supported by SLAs and customer support and is suitable for production workloads. A service credit is the percentage of the fee you have paid that will be credited to you in accordance with the claim approval process. Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft`s globally distributed, multi-model database service. It provides turnkey global distribution across an unlimited number of Azure regions by seamlessly scaling and replicating your data, regardless of where your users are located. The service provides full 99.99% SLAs that cover throughput, consistency, availability, and latency guarantees for Cosmos DB database accounts limited to a single Azure region configured with one of five consistency tiers or database accounts that span multiple Azure regions and are configured with one of four flexible consistency levels.
Azure Cosmos DB allows you to configure multiple Azure regions as writable endpoints for a database account. In this configuration, Cosmos DB provides a 99.999% SLA for read and write availability. Azure Container Registry is a free service and therefore does not have a financially supported SLA. However, the availability of the underlying storage is subject to the storage SLA. For more information, see Storage SLA. We guarantee at least 99.9% availability of Azure Active Directory Basic and Premium services. Services are considered available in the following scenarios: Azure Monitor now integrates Log Analytics and Application Insights capabilities to monitor your application. If necessary, you can continue to use Log Analytics and Application Insights as standalone services.
See respective SLAs below. For more information about eligibility for the Windows Virtual Desktop Service, see the license terms described here. Microsoft does not offer a financially supported SLA. Our goal is to achieve at least 99.9% availability for Windows Virtual Desktop service URLs. The availability of session host VMs in your subscription is covered by the VM SLA. For example, suppose you have a VM instance with a 99% SLA and a database with the same SLA, i.e. 99%Then Azure service total SLA = 0.99 * 0.99 = 98%The more services you have, the lower the SLA. The Azure SLA is a great place to start when considering your Azure design. Reviewing the requirements for a specific service level for a particular Azure service will give you an overview of how Microsoft should use the service. For example, Cosmos DB; By default, Cosmos DB offers an impressive 99.99% service level, but by configuring multiple Azure regions as writable endpoints for a database account, Cosmos DB provides a 99.999% SLA for read and write availability.
You can improve availability using several native Azure options, and you can use availability sets for virtual machines. An availability set is a logical grouping of virtual machines that Azure can use to understand how your application is designed for redundancy and availability. You can use Availability Zones for services such as virtual machine scale sets (used in Azure Kubernetes services), Azure Backup, storage accounts, key vaults, and many other services. An Availability Zone is a high availability offering that protects your applications (and data) from data center failures. Availability Zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region, and each enabled region has at least three distinct zones. Each zone consists of one or more data centers with independent power, cooling, and networking. You can monitor and track the overall health of Azure on the Azure Status page. For individual Azure components, you can go to the Service Health page for that particular resource. The Health page contains current service issues, upcoming planned maintenance, relevant explanations and guidance.
Events on the Health page are stored for 90 days. Resource health provides information about the health of individual cloud resources, such as a specific instance of virtual machines. As with private preview, all preview services are provided “as is” and are not subject to service level agreements (SLAs). Again, previews are usually free. We guarantee at least 99.9% availability of the backup and restore capabilities of the Azure Backup service. Service Credits – Service Credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for any performance or availability issues with a service under the Agreement and this SLA. You cannot unilaterally charge your applicable monthly service fee for performance or availability issues. Advisor is a free service, so it doesn`t have a financially supported SLA. (For a very cool Azure SLA, see: azurecharts.com/sla) Azure Virtual WAN is a network service that provides optimized and automated connectivity to branch offices through Azure.
Virtual WAN enables customers to connect branch offices to each other and to Azure, and centralize their networking and security requirements with virtual devices such as firewalls and Azure networking and security services. Azure provides service credit if the agreed SLA is not met. Most SLAs offer a service credit, which is the percentage of the applicable monthly service fee that is credited to you after Microsoft approves the request. Some services, such as virtual machines, offer up to 100% service credit when the monthly uptime percentage drops below 95% and 25% when uptime falls below 99.99%. However, other services, such as Azure Functions, offer a maximum service credit of 25% when the monthly uptime percentage falls below 99%. The SLA provides only service credits and does not cover any additional damage your organization may have suffered when your application failed, and is therefore no alternative to adding high availability or resiliency to your Azure design. To request a service credit, you must submit a request in the form of a support ticket with all required information by the end of the calendar month following the month in which the incident occurred.