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Rating method

Scope, evidence hierarchy, scoring states, review cadence, expiry, correction, and appeal for the Cloud Exit Standard.
Important

Method status: v0.1 draft. It is suitable for calibration and public review, not yet for issuing a badge.

Unit of assessment

The unit is provider + product + region + commercial plan + review date. Company-wide claims are prohibited unless every material product and region in scope has been tested. A result can therefore differ across regions, storage classes, or contract types from the same provider.

Result states

State Meaning
Pass Evidence satisfies the criterion in the stated scope.
Partial A practical path exists, but a material limitation remains.
Fail Evidence shows the criterion is not satisfied.
Unknown Evidence is missing, inaccessible, contradictory, or not yet tested.
Stale The review is older than its validity window.

Unknown is not a failure. Stale is not silently converted into the last known result.

Evidence hierarchy

  1. Contract, official price page, technical documentation, incident report, or machine-readable provider data.
  2. Reproducible measurement with inputs, date, region, account class, and raw output.
  3. First-party operating account with a named organization and bounded workload.
  4. Independent reporting with links to primary evidence.
  5. Editorial analysis, clearly labeled and never sufficient by itself for a rating.

Every citation records a collection date. Screenshots preserve transient price or policy states but do not replace a stable URL when one exists.

Review flow

  1. Scope the exact product, region, plan, and features under test.
  2. Collect primary sources and archive the source window.
  3. Reproduce export, interface, or price tests where access permits.
  4. Review every C1–C5 field and record dissent or unknowns.
  5. Notify the provider or maintainer of the factual draft when a contact is available.
  6. Publish the result, evidence bundle, review date, and expiry date together.
  7. Revisit material changes and the scheduled review window.

The dataset target is a quarterly release. Each individual rating expires after 180 days unless its sources are rechecked. This prevents a missed quarterly release from presenting old information as current.

Corrections and appeals

Anyone may submit contrary evidence. A valid appeal identifies the exact field, scope, date, and primary source or reproducible test. Factual corrections are made promptly with a visible revision note. Method disagreements are recorded and considered for the next standard version; they do not rewrite an old test after seeing the result.

Conflicts of interest

The initiator, Ruohang Feng, sells commercial support for Pigsty, a self-hosted PostgreSQL platform, and may benefit from decisions to self-host databases. Named commercial tools must repeat relevant disclosures on the page that names them. Reviewers record employment, investment, sponsorship, consulting, and competitive interests. Disclosure does not make a claim correct; it lets the reader price the risk while checking the evidence.

Versioning policy

  • Standard changes use semantic document versions: major for incompatible criteria, minor for new fields or thresholds, patch for clarifications.
  • Dataset releases use a date plus revision and never overwrite a prior published snapshot.
  • Provider results point to the exact standard and dataset versions used.
  • The registry shows stale and withdrawn states instead of erasing history.