Cloud platforms, as a remotely managed service, come with a service-level agreement (SLA) that guarantees an uptime percentage or your money back. These SLAs, and the shifting of responsibility of infrastructure maintenance from your organisation or colocation provider to the clouds in use in your organisation, have prompted an expectation that cloud services will “just work”, even though reality often falls short of that.
Computing infrastructure has become faster and cheaper over time, but a server today is not meaningfully more reliable than a decade ago, because the root causes of outages are often environmental or the result of third-party error.
