[jpalomaki]

IMO: In quite many cloud services the SLA is only useful as some kind of vague indicator on what the system was designed for. The reason I'm saying this is that quite often you just get a small amount of service credits if the SLA is not met.

For many SaaS businesses the service credits are quite useless, because you provide so much value on top of the cloud services you purchase. You pay $1 for cloud and charge $50 from your customer for your app. If cloud is down, you get $0.10 as credits and need to credit $5 for your own customer (in good case).

(I'm not blaming the cloud providers for this. If they would offer better terms, they would need to anyways transfer the risk to their customers and significantly raise the prices or take the risk of going bankrupt in case of major problems).