Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Service-level agreements (SLAs)

An SLA is an implicit or explicit contract between a service provider and one or more service consumers. The SLA outlines a set of SLOs that have to be met and the consequences for both meeting and failing to meet them.

Note that, depending on the type of service being offered, the role of the consumer can be fulfilled either by an external third party or an internal company stakeholder. In the former case, an SLA would typically define a list of financial penalties for failing to meet the agreed SLOs. In the latter case, SLA terms can be less strict but must nevertheless be factored in when authoring SLAs for other downstream services.

Having understood these SRE-related terms, let's move on to metrics.