Why SLAs are redundant, but Zencoder offers one anyway. | Hacker News Reader

Why SLAs are redundant, but Zencoder offers one anyway.

zencoder.com

27 pointsjon_dahl9 comments

SLAs seem to have the effect of dramatically changing the culture of the team that is now measured by the SLA.

I remember two times when my managers announced an SLA. First time was "Every priority 1 ticket has to be answered within 24 hours". Before the SLA we were a cheerful and overworked IT team, doing our best to handle all tickets within reasonable times and with our best quality responses. Afterwards - We started negotiating priorities, replying "investigating" within 24 hours to make sure management doesn't get on our case, and we had lots of not-so-funny jokes about announcing "love every 38 hours" SLAs to our spouses.

The second time they actually went as far as saying "This SLA is between marketing, sales and the customer. You don't need to worry about it. Just keep on doing what you always did."

They had to say that, because with our current equipment and processes, offering 99.9% availability to our customers was impossible. Our real availability was an average of 99.5% with some services as low as 97%. Not because we were horrible IT - but because of trade-off decisions we reached in the past together with our management.

It didn't help much. Because we didn't trust management not to start holding us to those SLAs at a random moment. Which they did.

Again, from a team that did their best to keep servers up, we became expert negotiators of which downtimes "count" and which don't. Also, we because very defensive: "We can't risk upgrading this month, we were already down 13 minutes."

I understand the need to sell to corporates, but I would be very very careful communicating SLAs to my team.

The problem there is not with SLAs at all, but with how they are set. It is sadly common for SLAs to be dictated by marketing/bidding/sales, with no regard for reality.

Similarly, if you can't reply to every priority 1 ticket within 24 hours, that suggests that not every one is priority 1, rather than simply an issue with SLAs as a concept.

While the many points of this article are true...I would like to point out that an SLA provides a means to punish the service provider...in hopes of better behavior.

I run an IT department with a massive MPLS network from ATT. When a circuit goes down - it is true that I don't regain MY costs by enforcing the terms of the SLA and collecting the remuneration that is due. However, I do many times collect a significant amount of credits at times...and that causes regional managers at ATT to take notice and start making infrastructure improvements to improve actual up time...which is what I want - and then that allows me to actually pay them for their circuit - which is what they want.

Right -- it's sort of a way for sales & marketing departments at service providers to force operations to improve uptime.

From my perspective as a service provider, I feel major pain whenever our service hiccups. If something goes down, the fear of unhappy customers (or losing customers) looms much larger than the fear of having to issue a service credit. For us at least, the latter is a tiny motivator compared to the former.

But a small startup is probably motivated by different things than a large, vaguely monopolistic company (like an ISP).

Yeah, that's the perspective of the client.

The perspective of the service provider is that it's a marketing feature to sell. The trade off being that the service starts to be "risk managed" more and more.

I personally haven't seen better services due to SLAs, but I do know I'm not the center of the universe.

The reason for refunds in the hosting business is not to compensate the buyer for any loss of business they might suffer if their site goes down (this will probably be many times what the service provider would make from the account); it's to tie the failure of the buyer's systems to something the service provider would self-evidently prefer to avoid.

Service providers could also signal their reliability by offering "loss of business" insurance at low premiums. If a service provider will pay you $10,000/day in the event that your site is unavailable, and the premium on this insurance is $5/month, it's pretty likely that they're not expecting to have to pay this out very often.

(Royal Mail offers fairly cheap loss/damage insurance, which is a good sign their service is reliable. Not sure about DHL/Fedex.)

"Emergency Maintenance" seems to be a pretty broad get out of jail free card to me. I trust the Zencoder guys aren't going to try and weasel out of their commitments (and this SLA is probably better than most), but if you're having downtime for almost any reason, wont you be doing "Emergency Maintenance" to bring the site back up?

Fair point. We'll reconsider the wording of that one. The expected use case is something like a critical security patch - we might have to bring a service down for a security update - but that is pretty broad.

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