What is the SLA for Azure maps in terms of guaranteed up 99.9 percent 99.99 percent?

Since the initial release of the Virtual Machine (VM) hosting service within Microsoft Azure there’s been a limitation on achieving the minimum requirements for the 99.9% SLA guarantee. This limitation has been that you needed to provision at least 2 VMs to get the SLA guarantee. That is until now. Now, there is an option to provision a single instance VM and have the 99.9% SLA guarantee too!

Microsoft is constantly working to improve and add new features / services to the Microsoft Azure platform. Among the latest of these changes is to support a 99.9% SLA with SINGLE instance VMs. While this isn’t a replacement for multi-instance VM configurations, this offers enhanced reliability for workloads where a single VM instance works.

Single Instance VM SLA Requirement

There are a few requirements that need to be met in order to achieve the 99.9% SLA guarantee for a single instance VM. The storage used for the VM Operating System and Data disks must be using Premium Storage. Premium Storage offers a much higher level of availability and performance with 5,000 IOPS per disk, versus 500 IOPS per disk with Standard Storage. The way Premium storage offers this is by utilizing SSD storage drives within the data center that are located on the same server hardware where the VM is running. Premium storage also offers a much higher throughput rate per disk of 2 Gbps.

Single Instance VMs must use Premium Storage to obtain 99.9% SLA guarantee.

Benefits of Multi-Instance VM Configuration

While it may sound appealing to configure your workloads to use a single instance VM, after all you can now get the 99.9% SLA guarantee, it’s still more adventagous to configure your workloads to use a multi-instance VM configuration instead. Among these is a higher SLA guarantee for multi-instance VMs of 99.95%.

Multi-Instance VM workloads achieve a higher 99.95% SLA guarantee.

For the vast majority of workloads it’s best to use a configuration consisting of multiple VM instances for added availability, reliability, and scalability. The best way to achieve all three of these is to use the Microsoft Azure service that is VM Scale Sets.

For more information on the SLA guarantee for Virtual Machines within Microsoft Azure, you can read the official SLA for Virtual Machines details page.

About the Author

Chris Pietschmann

Chris Pietschmann is a Microsoft MVP (Azure & IoT) and HashiCorp Ambassador (2021) with 20+ years of experience designing and building Cloud & Enterprise systems. He has worked with companies of all sizes from startups to Fortune 100. He is also a Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect and developer, a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), and Cloud Advocate. He has a passion for technology and sharing what he learns with others to help enable them to learn faster and be more productive.

⚠ Limited availability mode due to shared monthly budget. Estimated availability this month: till 11/18/22.

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AVAILABILITY SLA	AI + Machine Learning	Analytics	Compute	Databases	Development	Identity + Security	IoT + MR	Integration	Management + Governance	Media + Comms	Migration	Networking	Storage
100% ⭢												Azure DNS
99.999% ⭢				Cosmos DB
			Redis Cache
99.995% ⭢				SQL Database
99.99% ⭢		Event Hubs	Virtual Machines	Database for PostgreSQL		Azure AD B2C		API Management				Azure Front Door	Azure Storage
			Apache Cassandra MI		Azure Key Vault		Event Grid				Private Link	Azure NetApp Files
			Database for MySQL		Azure Active Directory						Azure Firewall
			Database for MariaDB		DDoS Protection						Load Balancer
											Traffic Manager
99.95% ⭢		Databricks	Container Apps									Route Server
		App Service (Linux)									Azure Bastion
		App Service									Application Gateway
		Azure Functions									VPN Gateway
		Azure Red Hat OpenShift									Virtual WAN
		Kubernetes Service									ExpressRoute
		Cloud Services
99.9% ⭢	Applied AI Services	Azure Purview	Azure VMware Solution	SQL Server Stretch DB	Azure DevOps	Defender for Cloud	Remote Rendering	Web PubSub	Azure Arc	Comm. Services	Site Recovery	Network Watcher	Confidential Ledger
Machine Learning	Synapse Analytics	Container Instances		Azure Spring Cloud	Azure Sentinel	Digital Twins	Healthcare APIs	Azure Monitor	Media Services			Data Share
Bot Service	Data Explorer	Container Registry		App Configuration	Information Protection	Spatial Anchors	Notification Hubs	Automation	Azure CDN			StorSimple
Microsoft Genomics	Data Factory	Azure Batch		Lab Services	Azure AD DS	IoT Central	Service Bus	Azure Backup				Data Lake Storage
Cognitive Services	Power BI Embedded			SignalR Service		Azure Maps	Logic Apps
Cognitive Search	Analysis Services			Visual Studio App Center		IoT Hub
	Data Lake Analytics					Time Series Insights
	Data Catalog
	HDInsight
	Stream Analytics
SLA N/A ⭢	Open Datasets		Service Fabric		DevTest Labs	Dedicated HSM	IoT Edge		Azure Advisor		Azure Migrate	Virtual Network	Managed Disks
Project Bonsai		VM Scale Sets		Load Testing		Azure Sphere		Azure Blueprints		DB Migration Service	Azure Orbital	Avere vFXT
		CycleCloud		Azure Chaos Studio		Object Anchors		Cost Management		Data Box	Internet Analyzer	HPC Cache
		Virtual Desktop		Microsoft Dev Box				Azure Policy			VNet Manager	Azure Elastic SAN
		Dedicated Host		Deployment Environments				Managed Apps
		Azure Quantum						Cloud Shell
								Azure Portal
								Azure Lighthouse
								Azure Automanage

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