The cloud consumer wants to have a guarantee that their services will be available for a certain amount of time. If not, there should be some sort of compensation. Agreements on the availability are documented in Service Level Agreements (also called SLAs).

SLAs are not sexy. I have seen many providers with an unclear SLA and customers not worrying about it. If you are a customer of a cloud service provider, you should be concerned about a SLA: know what it says, what the maximum downtime is, and how the service provider compensates for this.

Each SLA of a cloud provider is different. For one provider, the SLA is effective for the complete virtual machine, including dependent services such as storage and networking, while for another provider, the SLA only covers the virtual machine and is not applicable to virtual machine storage. Some are measured in years and some in months of availability.

As Microsoft Azure offers various services, each service has...