Cloud SLA Asymmetry
Cloud SLA Credits vs Real Downtime Cost
Why AWS, Azure and GCP Don't Actually Reimburse You
Updated April 2026 · Source: AWS, Azure, GCP SLA documentation
The Core Problem
SLA credits are 10-30% of your monthly service fee for the affected service. Not 10-30% of your revenue loss. Not 10-30% of your actual cost. Your monthly fee for one service. For a $3/month VM down 7+ hours, your maximum AWS credit is $0.90.
The Asymmetry Table
This is the chart every SRE should show their CFO before a cloud cost conversation.
| Service / Monthly Fee | Outage Duration | Max SLA Credit | Est. Business Loss | Credit Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EC2 Instance ($3/mo) | 7hr | $0.90 | $50,000 | 0.002% |
| EC2 Instance ($100/mo) | 7hr | $10-30 | $50,000 | 0.02-0.06% |
| RDS Database ($500/mo) | 2hr | $50-150 | $200,000 | 0.025-0.075% |
| Load Balancer ($1,000/mo) | 4hr | $100-300 | $400,000 | 0.025-0.075% |
| S3 (many apps down, $50/mo) | 3hr | $5-15 | $150,000 | 0.003-0.01% |
| Azure VM Cluster ($5,000/mo) | 5hr | $1,250-5,000 | $1,000,000 | 0.125-0.5% |
| GCP GKE Cluster ($10,000/mo) | 2hr | $2,500-10,000 | $800,000 | 0.31-1.25% |
Business loss estimates are illustrative. Actual loss depends on your revenue rate. Credit amounts are based on current AWS/Azure/GCP SLA credit tiers. The ratio column shows what percentage of your loss the credit covers.
How Each Cloud Provider Calculates Credits
AWS
SLA Docs| Monthly Uptime % | EC2 Credit | S3 Credit | RDS Credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99.99%+ | 0% (no breach) | 0% | 0% |
| 99% - 99.99% | 10% of month bill | 10% | 10% |
| <99% | 30% of month bill | 25% | 30% |
Gotcha: You must file a claim within 30 days. Business or Enterprise support plan required. Credits apply to future bills only - no cash refunds. AWS determines whether the incident qualifies.
Azure
SLA Docs| Monthly Uptime % | Credit |
|---|---|
| 99% - 99.99% | 25% of monthly service fee |
| <99% | 100% of monthly service fee |
Updated 2024: Azure now automatically applies some credits for verified incidents, removing the claim requirement for certain services. Still limited to the monthly service fee cap. The CrowdStrike-adjacent Azure outages in July 2024 triggered credits for affected VM customers.
GCP
SLA Docs| Monthly Uptime % | Credit |
|---|---|
| 99% - 99.99% | 10-25% of monthly service fee |
| <95% | 50% of monthly service fee |
GCP SLA credits are applied as Google Cloud credits to future invoices. Claims must be submitted within 30 days. Different services have different SLA percentages - GKE Autopilot has a 99.95% SLA; Compute Engine has 99.99%.
What to Do Instead
SLA credits are not insurance - treat them as a minor discount, not protection. If you are building a business case for reliability investment, here is how to actually protect against downtime cost:
Multi-cloud / Multi-region
Eliminate single-provider dependency. AWS + Cloudflare Workers = dramatically reduced correlated failure risk. Higher cost; justified for revenue-critical workloads.
Business Interruption Insurance
Traditional BI insurance can cover IT-caused outage revenue loss. Cyber-specific BI riders have improved significantly since 2020. Works per-claim up to policy limits.
Reliability Investment ROI
Use the downtime cost calculator to show CFO: one prevented outage pays for 12 months of platform engineering or observability tooling. See /business-case.
Real Example: AWS us-east-1 December 2021
The December 2021 AWS us-east-1 outage lasted approximately 7 hours and affected EC2, ECS, Lambda, and dozens of dependent services. Aggregate customer losses were estimated at $150M+ by industry analysts.
AWS issued service credits to affected customers. The credits were calculated at 10% of monthly service fees for the affected services during the impacted period. For a customer running $10,000/month in us-east-1 services with $100,000 in revenue losses during the outage, the credit was approximately $1,000 vs $100,000 in losses.
This is not an accusation - it is how SLAs are designed. Cloud providers are selling infrastructure availability, not revenue insurance. The lesson is to price your reliability risk accordingly.