Uptime Institute Tiers

Overview

The Uptime Institute created the standard Tier Classification System to evaluate various data center facilities in terms of potential site infrastructure performance, or uptime. Uptime Institute has not authorized other organizations to certify data centers under its Tier Classification System. Uptime Institute does not design, build or operate data centers.

• How does AWS apply the Uptime Institute guidelines?

  The AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is the most secure, extensive, and reliable cloud platform. AWS data centers are generally designed to meet the requirements of concurrent maintainability, which is at the core of the Uptime Institute Tier standards. However, AWS has chosen not to have a certified Uptime Institute-based tiering level so that we have more flexibility to expand and improve performance. AWS' approach to infrastructure ensures the highest level of performance and availability for our customers. Specifically, AWS infrastructure within our Availability Zones exceeds concurrent maintainability standards by also focusing on metrics not tracked by those standards.
  

• How do AWS Availability Zones provide fault isolation?

  AWS has identified critical system components required to maintain the availability of the system and recover service in the event of outage. Critical system components are backed up across multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. Availability Zones are connected to each other with fast, private fiber-optic networking, enabling you to easily architect applications that automatically fail-over between Availability Zones without interruption.

• Can customers achieve high availability on AWS?

  Yes. AWS customers can build highly resilient systems in the cloud by employing multiple instances in multiple Availability Zones and data replication to achieve extremely high recovery time and recovery point objectives, as well as service availability of 99.99% and more. Service availability is therefore a function of the design; customers who care about the availability and performance of their applications want to deploy these applications across multiple Availability Zones in the same region for fault tolerance and low latency.