Lets just get straight to the point, Azure SQL Database across all service tiers gives you the customer a SLA of 99.99% up-time. This means potential unavailability periods shown below.

Good, bad, you decide. The point is that even in the cloud we “could” potentially encounter downtime. Can you improve on 99.99%? Well that was the question I asked Microsoft, I was given a “wishy-washy” answer that yes you can by using failover groups ( I’m guessing the read/write endpoint is key here ) to improve the up time. I then pressed on what sort of figure in terms of nines does this provide, to no avail.

So what happens if up time is less than 99.99% or even worse 99% (ouch). Service credits are available as shown below.

Caveats

Downtime from the following DOES not count as availability issues, I picked my favorite ones with my thoughts.

• Due to factors outside our reasonable control – This ranges from natural disasters to networking device failure outside of their data centers.
• Pre – release versions of the software – that’s understandable.
• That result from the use of services, hardware, or software not provided by us – So they are talking about 3^rd party services / software.
• That result from your unauthorized action or lack of action when required. Totally understand this, if I delete all my firewall rules well yes, that’s my fault.
• That result from your failure to adhere to any required configurations, use supported platforms, follow any policies for acceptable use. Here they mean unsupported operations? No idea what they mean. I tried using DBCC WRITEPAGE, it doesn’t work.
• That result from faulty input, instructions, or arguments (for example, requests to access files that do not exist) – this totally confused me.
• That result from your attempts to perform operations that exceed prescribed quotas or that resulted from our throttling of suspected abusive behaviour. Absolutely, HTTP floods are bad news.
• Due to your use of Service features that are outside of associated Support Windows. Do they mean deprecated features? No idea.

Anyway, the full list is shown here – a must read. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/sql-database/v1_1/