I understand that single instance VMs aren't eligible for an SLA in Azure. For the SMB customers who have important applications that weren't built well enough (Sage 50 in my case) to allow you to setup availability groups this poses a problem.
Does an application/hypervisor (on multiple availability sets) exist that sits between the Azure IaaS fabric and these single instance VMs that would in effect give them the SLA that the more advanced applications have?
Does Amazon EC2 offer something like this?
My current on-premises environment has this same problem but my hosts have been very reliable and don't have updates that require restarts done without my coordination.
Single VM SLA is possible in Azure for a couple of Time now... : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/virtual-machines/v1_2/
Azure provide SLA for EVERY service in their offer now.
I found that this article summarized it simply https://www.petri.com/azure-virtual-machines-sla
"In Microsoft’s opinion, no single virtual machine should be so important when you’re working in Azure; it’s all a part of Jeffrey Snover’s outlook on “treating your servers like cattle, not as pets.” This can prove to be incompatible with some workloads, as you will find out."
Azure is looking to the future by not providing an SLA for single instance VMs. I haven't found a 3rd party solution that accomplishes what I was looking for with Azure at this time.
Amazon does provide single instance SLA of 99.95%
CORRECTION: Amazon doesn't provide a single instance SLA. The first tier of sales gave me inaccurate information.