3Tera, the cloud maker, has come up with the first Five9s cloud computing service level agreement (SLA) and plans to use it to warrant the availability of its AppLogic Virtual Private Datacenter (VPDC) widgetry.

SLAs are rare in the cloud. Amazon's EC2 has one but it only guarantees 99.95% availability during the service year. And Amazon's credit is limited to 10%. 3Tera's move could function as a wake-up call for other cloud players.

Starting next month, the VPDC service will include a 99.999% availability SLA that's supposed to make customers rest easier about putting mission-critical apps and services in the cloud.

The company says it's "committed to using all commercially reasonable efforts to achieve at least 99.999% availability for each user every month. In conjunction with data replication services provided by our Disaster Recovery Suite of appliances, the SLA provides users the ability to build highly available services in the cloud."

It claims that achieving Five9s requires a complete system approach from data center partners to the architecture of AppLogic and the training of its operations staff.

President and CTO Peter Nickolov said, "Offering the SLA ourselves will enable us to aid our partners in achieving Five9s for their AppLogic subscribers as well."

The browser-based AppLogic is of course used to build private clouds and as a platform for cloud computing services.

3Tera said its SLA, unlike many others, wouldn't require users to document outages with complicated record-keeping and dreary paperwork, but would apply credits automatically since AppLogic constantly monitors and reports on the availability of the system.

According to the terms of the SLA, VPDC customers - at least those who subscribe to the company's Assured Success Plan - will automatically get SLA service credits for any calendar month in which availability falls below the targeted 99.999%. If availability is anywhere between 99.999% and 99.9%, a 10% credit applies to the whole VPDC service for the entire month. If availability is lower than 99.9%, they get a 25% credit.

To start the SLA program will only be good for services provisioned in the US.