The Liftr team is always looking for new ways to measure the successes, failures, and fluctuations in the public cloud market. As new technologies emerge and change the way people purchase and utilize cloud, it is necessary to make minor adjustments to the Index as part of regular maintenance. After months of gathering and analyzing data, the Liftr team has a few announcements to make about small adaptations to Liftr Metrics.
The first addition is the new Twitter Outage Mentions metric, which contributes to the Reliability category of the Index. The new metric checks for an influx of tweets with the word ‘outage’ in them for our tracked providers, and then the Liftr team sets that value as a percentage of total tweets. This allows the team to measure outages in real-time and get a sense of reliability from the customer perspective. Users should expect to see more frequent and subtle shifts in the Reliability Category going forward that indicate the effect of users’ tweets on the index score.
Also in the Reliability category, the SLA Downtime Credit metric is a measure of how each provider stands by their uptime promises. Most providers promise a percentage of uptime for access to compute and storage instances, and they back up this promise with assurances in their Service Level Agreements to refund a portion of customer’s monthly bills if reliability does fall below certain thresholds. The added metric will give an indication of how reliable a provider believes they are, and how much money they were willing to stake on the claim. Overall, both changes to the Reliability category will cause an upward baseline shift in that section, and a slight overall lift in Index scores.
In the Security category, the Liftr team is adding a new metric as well. Security Services will count the total number of security certifications a provider can offer. This is an important subset of the overall compliance count metric, because not all compliances will be related to security, but many are. By keeping track of security related compliance frameworks offered by a provider, we can get a sense of what kind of overall security profile a provider has.
Lastly in the Price category, we have added the Equivalent Product Cost metric. Equivalent Product Cost takes a theoretically interchangeable instance offered from each major provider and compares the cost of each one across the board. Similar to the ROI category, this metric will give an idea of what a ‘basic’ instance price for the provider is, though each tends to have cheaper and more expensive items rather than an overall consistent price structure. The purpose of the new Price metric is to help even out spikes cause by atypical instances, which do not represent the overall cost relationship between our major players.
These changes indicate the growth and progress of the cloud industry as more and more companies do more business in the cloud. Keep an eye on LiftrNews.com for more updates to the Liftr Index, as well as for the latest in cloud news.
