What is Service Level Objective (SLO) vs SLA?
Updated Apr 28, 2026
Short answer
SLA is the legal agreement with users; SLO is the internal target for a specific metric (e.g., latency).
Deep explanation
Intermediate reliability engineering involves handling distributed failures and defining metrics. SLA is the legal agreement with users; SLO is the internal target for a specific metric (e.g., latency).
Real-world example
A mobile app retrying to connect to a server when the signal is weak.
Common mistakes
- Retrying indefinitely without a cap, which can crash the server when it comes back up.
Follow-up questions
- What are the three states of a Circuit Breaker?