A tremendously important implication of an SLA such as this one is that you are no longer responsible for ensuring a particular service redundancy. (Redundancy is the deployment of functional capabilities that would be unnecessary in a fault-free environment). Azure platform is taking full responsibility of ensuring the service's availability during planned maintenance or unplanned failure of the underlying infrastructure, be it at the hardware, network, or operating system level.
This is important because ensuring service redundancy is both difficult and costly.
To illustrate this point, consider a comparison to a traditional data center. To achieve a similar uptime SLA for our application in a traditional data ...