[azurezyq]

The evil part of outages is that, no matter how much resource you dumped into developments toward a more reliable system, it still happens. This is true for every company including Google. So when one company is choosing between cloud providers, they compare these SLAs with themselves. Usually it's pretty hard for a random shop to reach good SLAs. So I don't see "business risk" here. Risks present all the time, CTO should try hard to minimize them but no way to remove them.

Selling insurance for SLAs seems to be an interesting idea, but this kind of insurance might be really similar to earthquake insurance, since violation of SLAs tend to be not common (otherwise why committing) but it might be a huge cascade failure once happens. Would you like to buy one? Earthquake insurance quirks all apply.

On the other side, Google has zero incentives to violate SLAs. A. You really cannot control how large the violation would be. B. Damage to branding >>>>>> money payout.