The story that rocked the cloud world this week was that Microsoft started to provide an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for single instance Virtual Machines. Before this change, customers we’re only eligible for such support guidelines when deploying at least two Virtual Machines in an availability set. The difficulty here is that many older applications aren’t suited for this type of deployment, to not even mention the backend of those applications (databases, message repositories, etc).
This requirement was the same across al VM sizes and types and when you could fulfill these requirements you’d have Virtual Machine Connectivity assurance of 99.95%

What has changed?

Microsoft changed the requirement for their SLA to include Single Instance Virtual Machines, but there is a trade off here. In the “old” SLA for Virtual Machines it didn’t matter what kind of Virtual Machine or storage you were using, for the Single Instance Virtual Machine to be covered by the SLA, there is a single (quite expensive) pre-requisite:

  • The single instance VM needs to use Premium Storage for all disks.

When you meet this single requirement on your single VM, you acquire an uptime guarantee of 99.9%.

All though this might seems like a harsh requirement, it now gives you the opportunity to do real “Lift-and-shift” migrations of your older applications towards Microsofts’ public cloud platform. Looking forward to the bright future of the platform and improvements on the uptime warranties…

Want to know more, or did any questions come up when you were reading this? Do you have some feedback for me? Leave a comment or drop me an email.

Until the next time, keep it cloudy!

Bert Wolters
http://www.twitter.com/BertWolters

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