Can a cloud provider provide 100% availability?
The availability rate matters a lot in cloud computing services. A low-level service may provide an uptime of “two nines” (99%), while a high-level service may provide an uptime of “four nines” (99.99%).
100% uptime doesn't take into consideration routine maintenance, otherwise known as “planned downtime”. It's also important to note that individually managed servers can go down independent of network failure due to problems outside a hosting providers control.
What does 99.99 availability correspond to? The secret to achieving the next “9” for 99.99% is cluster technology. Often referred to as high availability solutions, clusters are essentially two or more physical servers connected in a single network. If one server fails, application support resumes on a second server.
What is availability in cloud computing? High availability is the ultimate goal of moving to the cloud. The idea is to make your products, services, and tools available to your customers and employees at any time from anywhere using any device with an internet connection.
A true 100-percent availability SLA actually means your provider will do everything in its power to make sure your systems are constantly online and your customers do not experience any outages.
While the idea of 100% uptime may be very appealing, it may not always be possible. However, companies can make the most of their infrastructure and get closer to their uptime targets with a little help from these tips.
Software systems must all function correctly to deliver the necessary IT functionality at all times. Despite multiple layers, protections, and redundancy, systems and components fail. This makes 100% availability virtually impossible in any IT environment, large or small.
Five-nines availability -- or 99.999% -- is the percentage of time a network component or service is accessible to a user in a given period, usually defined as a year. The migration from private networks to cloud services has led companies to demand that service providers offer five-nines availability.
4 9s (99.99%) scenario. PDFRSS. This availability goal for applications requires the application to be highly available and tolerant to component failures. The application must be able to absorb failures without needing to get additional resources.
99.9% uptime equals to a period of downtime of 1 minute and 26 seconds per day. 99.99% uptime equals to a period of downtime of less than 9 seconds per day. 99.999% uptime equals to a period of downtime of less than 1 second per day.
What percentage of availability do cloud providers have?
The availability rate matters a lot in cloud computing services. A low-level service may provide an uptime of “two nines” (99%), while a high-level service may provide an uptime of “four nines” (99.99%).
What is high availability in cloud computing? High availability in the cloud is a computing infrastructure that allows a system to continue functioning, even when certain components fail.

- Determine how much uptime you need. Uptime is a measurement of how long a system properly functions. ...
- Understand core high availability components. ...
- Assess application needs before adding HA.
People typically talk in terms of nines of availability, which expresses system availability (uptime) as a percentage of total system time. Availability at 99% is OK as far as it goes, but that equates to more than seven hours of downtime per month.
High availability is generally measured in a percentage system where a 100% system denotes a never-failing service that experiences no outage or zero downtime.
An uptime of 99.99% translates to about five minutes of total downtime per month.
Use redundancy wherever possible. This means having multiple servers, routers, and other components in your system so that if one fails, there is a backup ready to take its place. To achieve 100% uptime, one would need to have a redundant system in place so that if one component fails, the other can take its place.
Thus, if your website has a 100 percent uptime, it would mean you have zero downtime. If you had 80 percent uptime, you would have 20 percent downtime. Obviously, the more uptime, the more reliable your website and server, and the less downtime your customers are going to experience.
If your business uses a service with a 99% uptime guarantee that means you should expect: 14 minutes, 24 seconds of downtime every day; 1 hour, 40 minutes and 48 seconds of downtime every week; 6 hours, 43 minutes and 12 seconds of downtime every month and.
A high availability infrastructure is a combination of hardware, software, and applications that are designed to recover quickly in case of outages and maintain functionalities in a way that assures minimum downtime and more than 99% availability.
What infrastructure components are needed for high availability?
- Application resilience. Application resilience can be classified by the effect to the user. ...
- Levels of application resiliency. ...
- Data resilience. ...
- Environment resilience. ...
- Simplicity.
Availability is the assurance that an enterprise's IT infrastructure has suitable recoverability and protection from system failures, natural disasters or malicious attacks.
AWS Service | SLA | Service Credit |
---|---|---|
EC2 | 99.95% | Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0% |
EC2 | 99.95% | Less than 99.0% |
Route 53 | 100 % | 5 – 30 minutes in a Billing Cycle |
Route 53 | 100 % | 31 minutes – 4 hours in a Billing Cycle |
Amazon EC2 Uptime SLA
This is a strong SLA—if you have an application that needs to run on EC2 and it requires 100% uptime, then the application should ideally be hosted across multiple regions.
The VM SLA of 99.99% means that you need to deploy at least two instances of your Virtual Machines across at least two Availability Zones within an Azure region. For example, VM1 deployed in Availability Zone 1 and VM2 deployed in Availability Zone 3 in the West US 2 Azure region.
Guaranteed uptime is expressed as SLA level and is generally the most important metric to measure the quality of a hosting provider. An SLA level of 99.99% for example equates to 52 minutes and 36 seconds of downtime per year.
Uptime of 99.9%, or “three nines,” allows for possible downtime of up to 8 hours, 45 minutes, and 36 seconds in a year.
For perspective, 99.9% availability means just shy of nine hours of downtime in a year and 99.99% means less than an hour of downtime in a single year.
Thus, if your website has a 100 percent uptime, it would mean you have zero downtime. If you had 80 percent uptime, you would have 20 percent downtime. Obviously, the more uptime, the more reliable your website and server, and the less downtime your customers are going to experience.
For example, 99.99% uptime means that a system should be available 99.99% of its designated operational time. The acceptable downtime to reach this goal is 52 minutes per year or 4 minutes per month assuming that we talk about the system that is required to operate continuously all year round.
What is the maximum system uptime?
According to Vxchnge, the “gold-standard” for annual network uptime that an organization should strive for is 99.999% (an uptime percentage referred to as “five-nines”), while the highest possible level is 99.99999% (seven-nines).
Three-nines availability -- 99.9% -- allows 8 hours and 46 minutes of downtime per year. The percentage of network availability translates literally into quantifiable hours, minutes and seconds of allowable network services downtime.
Meeting a Service Level Availability (SLA) of 99.5% means that a service can only be unavailable for 1 day 19 hours 49 minutes 44 seconds in a year.
Although 100% uptime is the goal, the industry considers 99.999% uptime as high availability. Every website experiences downtime planned or otherwise.
Uptime and availability are both essential metrics for measuring the reliability of digital systems and services. While uptime measures the time a system is up and running, availability considers both planned and unplanned downtime and the user's perspective.
SLA Uptime Metrics
The industry standard is five 9's, or 99.999% availability. But not every service provider offers that. In fact, when viewed over an entire year, what many companies offer can leave customers down for much longer than they think. Consider a service provider who offers 99% uptime in their SLA.
Uptime is a computer industry term for the time during which a computer or IT system is operational. Uptime can also be a metric that represents the percentage of time that hardware, a computer network, or a device is successfully operational.
As you can tell, the difference between 99.99% availability and 99.9% availability means an additional 7 hours of acceptable downtime for that service everywhere. That breaks down further to 1 minute and 26 seconds of downtime everyday, or 10 minutes and 48 seconds every week.
For example, hospitals and data centers require high availability of their systems—and no unscheduled downtime—to perform daily tasks. Unscheduled downtime may be a hardware or software failure, or adverse environmental conditions such as power outages, flooding or temperature changes.
A step above, 99.99%, or “four nines,” as is considered excellent uptime. But four nines uptime is still 52 minutes of downtime per year.
What does 99.95 uptime mean?
SLA level of 99.95 % uptime/availability results in the following periods of allowed downtime/unavailability: Daily: 43s. Weekly: 5m 2.4s. Monthly: 21m 44s. Quarterly: 1h 5m 12s.