Amazon S3: 99.99% Uptime in October

Amazon's S3 utility storage maintained 99.99 percent uptime in October, the first month in which the service offered a service level agreement (SLA), according to performance measurement firm WebMetrics. That uptime tops the minimum standard of 99.9 percent Amazon promised to deliver under its SLA.

WebMetrics monitored the response times and availability for the REST- and SOAP-based APIs for Amazon S3, which had monthly uptime percentage of 99.9915 and 99.9912, respectively. The S3 APIs were tested every five minutes, with timeout thresholds defined at 30 seconds. WebMetrics offers monitoring of all of Amazon's utility computing services on a subscription basis.

Amazon announced the new SLA on Oct. 9, and said it would be in effect for the month of October. Developers on Amazon's platform had been requesting an SLA for some time. That pressure was stepped up a notch after some customers lost data during a Sept. 29 outage of Amazon's EC2 service, which runs virtual appliances stored in S3. Analysts who have tracked the growth of Amazon web services said the introduction of an SLA will spur growth for the platform

Amazon S3 was launched in March 2006, and hosts more than 5 billion objects.