What’s the difference between SLO, SLA, and SLI in business projects?
If you work for a business, there’s a possibility that you’ve heard the terms SLO, SLA, and/or SLI before.
The commonality that these terms share is that they can be used to be a little more precise to measure the actions taken to meet business goals when it comes to serving users.
In this article, we’ll briefly describe what SLA’s are, SLO’s, and SLI’s and how they relate along with how are they different. By the end, you should have a better idea of what each one means and be able to use them more accurately.
We’ll start first with SLA.
SLA
SLA is short for Service Level Agreement.
Here’s how Atlassian describes SLA:
An SLA (service level agreement) is an agreement between provider and client about measurable metrics like uptime, responsiveness, and responsibilities.
Basically, an SLA lists out the promises that a provider — or a business — give to their customers along with any penalties that are fair to assess if the provider doesn’t meet the SLA requirements.
The stipulations within SLA’s can include 99.999% uptime (or some other variable amount of 9’s), 300 milliseconds response time, certain throughputs, and more.
