Uptime Institute's Tier Standards

Uptime Institute's Tier Standards is one of the global benchmarks for data center availability and performance. First developed over 30 years ago, these certifications verify that a facility's design, construction, and operation meet these standards, and serve as a mark of excellence for high-performing businesses.

Google Cloud goes beyond the status quo when it comes to data center compliance. To support organisations in an increasingly AI driven world, Google focuses on scalability of performance rather than the Tier Classification System. This is necessary due to the fact that the landscape of application architecture has evolved significantly since the inception of Uptime Tiering certifications. The rise of cloud computing and the widespread adoption of microservices architectures have introduced new paradigms for achieving high availability and fault tolerance.

While Uptime Tiering certifications remain relevant for certain types of applications and hosting environments, in the context of modern cloud-native applications, the emphasis has shifted towards designing applications with inherent redundancy and leveraging the capabilities of cloud platforms to achieve high availability and fault tolerance.

Google prioritizes maintaining zero downtime across all data centers. As a hyperscale cloud service provider, Google focuses on target availability using diverse design approaches and industry best practices, rather than solely relying on the tiering model/certification.

In this new paradigm, the focus has shifted from hardware redundancy to application-level redundancy and resilience. Google offers a range of managed services and features that automate failover, load balancing, and scaling, providing built-in mechanisms for maintaining high availability.

Our approach is better suited to the hyperscale model of a public Cloud Service Provider. We discuss our network further in our Security Overview paper.

You can monitor Google’s performance on an ongoing basis using the Service Health Dashboard for Google Cloud and the Status Dashboard for Google Workspace.