Considering amazon is always available according to their status page, this shouldn’t be too hard to meet.
For the record, I’m running in us-west-2 and have barely had any issues in the past 3+ years but I do wish they were more transparent with their status.
This is pretty neat! I'm honestly surprised they didn't stagger this update with a new tiered availability pricing, kind of like the discounted S3 option for reduced redundancy.
These don't quite work the same. S3's different durability SLAs are ultimately about how many copies of the data there are ... storing the data in more places more times gives more durability, but obviously costs a bit more in real terms, and that's reflected in the pricing and you get to choose.
Most of the redundancy that powers EC2s availability SLA is at the infrastructural level; power, network and so on. These resources are shared by all of EC2. But physical redundancy is really the "easy" part of an availability SLA, if it were just a matter of buying more routers and UPS's, it would be straightforward to hit any number of nines. Instead, the real work is all of the practices and culture that's been built up around managing a system at scale. The change process, the deployment process, and the root-cause-analysis process each are part of this; team members wouldn't lower their standards or depart from the process based on price, it'd be a very un-natural way to do things!
Sure, they have a Reduced Redundancy "feature". But you would be stupid to use it because RR costs more than the regular redundancy, not less. (One big hint is that it's not even listed on their regular pricing page anymore.)
That is how Amazon phases out features: Instead of raising the price, they just don't lower it. Over time, it becomes more expensive because all the other prices are going down.
You don't have to actually offer reduced redundancy to have multiple price points. Amazon could have added an option for big corporations to pay more for the increased SLA, the existence of the improved service agreement itself being the thing you're paying for.
Actual availability numbers is often secondary to Big Corp customers. The benefit of the CYA/SLA agreement, is that when shit does hit the fan, as the manager you get to shrug and say "well, we bought the improved SLA, not my fault Amazon failed to deliver".
For the record, I’m running in us-west-2 and have barely had any issues in the past 3+ years but I do wish they were more transparent with their status.