Service Availability Measurement

Service availability of networked applications is a rigorous service measurement that can be evolved from traditional deployments to cloud-based deployments. This chapter lays out service availability measurement evolution as: parsimonious service measurements, traditional service availability measurement, evolving service availability measurements, evolving hardware reliability, evolving elasticity service availability measurements, evolving release management service availability measurement, and service measurement outlook. While the first section illustrates how well designed service measurements have evolved, the second offers the telecommunications industry's TL 9000 SO service outage measurement standards as an example of rigorous traditional service availability measurement. Next, the chapter describes traditional hardware reliability measurements and evolves them to apply to virtual machine instances. It parsimoniously evolves service availability measurements of traditional growth and degrowth procedures to cover elastic capacity management actions of cloud-based applications. Finally, it discusses service availability measurements for traditional software upgrade procedures and reviews the benefits of evolution to cloud-based applications.