Amazon announced yesterday that, effective October 1st, they are offering a 99.9% uptime service level agreement for their Simple Storage Service (S3).

The full text of the SLA can be found here.

SLAs have been hard to come by in the free or cheap world of Web 2.0, where many service providers have come to make a buck, but where margins are not so generous yet as to make such devices easily affordable. Amazon certainly has the resources to stand behind it, and with this step, many corporations which might otherwise be leery of relying on over-the-wire storage service may be enticed to take the next step in outsourcing their commodity operations.

The 99.9% up-time guarantee might sound a little light to some; we're living in a world where IT has come to deliver the once-fabled "five nines" of reliability fairly consistently out of the box. I remember when 99.999% was the holy grail and only those who had massive budgets for redundant systems could get there. But today's hardware and software are more reliable and now if you aren't getting that sort of service in-house, then your operations team has a problem.

But this is the Internet, as much the frontier as your data center or server room was back in '98, and I don't think the lower figure is unreasonable considering the venture. It will improve, surely, as our infrastructure does around us.

Next up: when will EC2 come out of beta and will it get a similar SLA? And will other SaaS and online service providers jump on the bandwagon, or will Amazon be the lonely voice in the forest?