[AZ-900] Azure Service level Agreements

This is the nineteenth blog in the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification Series(AZ-900) of Topic 4: Azure Pricing And Support.

You can go through my previous topic 3.4 Microsoft Azure Governance to know more about Azure Blueprints and Azure Policy.

This blog covers the topic 4.3 Azure Pricing And Support: Azure service level agreements.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

SLAs document the specific terms that define Azure performance standards, they define Microsoft’s commitment to an Azure service or product.

Individual SLAs are available for each Azure product and service and they define what happens if a service fails or product fails to meet the designated availability commitments.

Check Out: What is a Resource Group in Azure? Click here

SLAs For Azure Products And Services

The following are the parameters Microsoft adheres to in terms of Azure services:

• Performance targets are expressed as uptime and connectivity guarantees.
• Performance-target range from 99.9% (three nines) to 99.99% (four nines).
• If a service fails to meet the guarantees, a percentage of the monthly service fees can be credited to you.

Also Check: What is Capex and Opex? Click here

Composite SLAs

When we combine SLAs across different service offerings, the resultant SLA is called composite SLA. The resulting composite SLA can provide higher or lower uptime values, depending on your application architecture.

Let’s take the example of a simple web application that writes data to a SQL Database. These two different Cloud Services (Web App and SQL database) have the following cloud SLAs:

• Web App – 99.95%
• SQL Database – 99.99%

Here if either service fails the whole application will fail. generally, the individual probability of both services failing is independent. However, the composite SLA value for this application is:

99.95% x 99.99% = 99.94%

This shows that the combined probability of failure is higher than the individual SLA values which are to be expected in an application that relies on multiple services and hence will have more potential failure points.

Check out: Microsoft Azure provides governance features and services in order to implement policy-based management for all Azure services available on-cloud and on-premise. In this blog post, we’ll cover Topic 3.4 Microsoft Azure Governance which includes Azure Blueprints & Azure Policy.

Application SLAs

Customers should determine what application-specific SLAs they need based on their workload requirements and usage patterns.

Following are some of the important SLA points customers should keep in mind when architecting their applications on the cloud:

• Establish availability metrics such as mean time to recovery (MTTR) and mean time between failures (MTBF) that are acceptable to your Application deployment.
• Map out recovery metrics such as recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) in the planning phase of the deployment itself as they are crucial to your disaster recovery plan.

Related/References

1. [AZ-900] Microsoft Azure Certification Fundamental Exam: Everything You Must Know
2. Learn how to create a Free Microsoft Azure Trial Account
3. [AZ-900] Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: Topic 1.1 Overview & Benefits 
4. Topic 2.1 Azure Architecture: Region, Availability Zone & Geography
5. How to Register For [AZ-900] Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification Exam
6. Topic 3.1 Microsoft Azure Secure Network Connectivity: Firewall, DDOS, & NSG
7. Topic 3.2 Microsoft Azure Core Identity Services: AD & MFA 
8. Topic 3.3 Microsoft Azure Security Services: Security Center, Key Vault, AIP & ATP
9. Official Microsoft page for AZ-90 and exam registration can be found here.

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