Umowa o gwarantowanym poziomie świadczenia usług

When you become a client at GigaCloud, you are given a Service Level Agreement to sign. SLA is a document defining the level of service which the provider is expected to maintain for its clients. 

Such an agreement includes the following elements:

• list and description of services provided by the operator
• scope and time of their execution
• areas of responsibility of the supplier and the customer
• Wsparcie
• reporting requirements and service quality assessment metrics
• cost of services, fines, and terms of payment

GigaCloud signs SLA with its clients and provides service in accordance with the requirements stated in the agreement.

Availability is a key

The main service quality feature is availability, that is the uptime guarantee for a service. It includes the expected uptime of the infrastructure, excluding scheduled maintenance or downtime.

Let’s see into what it really means for a client. As a month has around 730 hours, a 99.95% SLA stands for 729 hours, 38 minutes and 6 seconds of infrastructure availability during the given month. That is, the possible tolerable monthly downtime will be 21 minutes and 54 seconds. In case any provider’s infrastructure downtime exceeds the expected amount of time, the agreement is deemed as violated, and the provider has to pay fines.

What SLA GigaCloud provides

GigaCloud ensures that its clients have a 99.95% SLA when ordering a VMware-based managed private cloud or public solutions. They are built on the basis of widely geographically distributed data centers within the EU. 

Why not 100%?

As much as we would like to offer a perfect 100% SLA, it is virtually impossible for anyone to reach. The cloud operator’s SLA cannot exceed the amount which the data center, where it stores all the ‘cloud’ equipment, guarantees. 

The reliability of data centers is determined by their Tier category. There are four of them, and they are displayed in percentages of their uptime.

GigaCloud places its equipment in data centers of the TIER III level, which offer 99.98% reliability. But the cloud operator has to have some spare time to react, so the SLA can’t be less than 99.95% at this point.

Also, sometimes a failure can occur at the software level, which is not affected by the operator, because it is the responsibility of the customer. This way, the agreement is not violated on the part of the cloud operator.

The more nines you see after the decimal point, the more expensive it will be to rent a virtual platform. And not all IT services need such a fault-tolerant cluster.