Question

Your team operates a customer-facing payments API. The business is negotiating a contractual SLA with a large enterprise customer promising 99.9% monthly availability, with financial penalties if the target is missed. As the DevOps engineer responsible for reliability, what do you recommend for setting your internal SLO relative to this SLA?

Accepted Answer

Set the internal SLO to a stricter target than the SLA (e.g., 99.95%) so the team is alerted and takes action before the contractual SLA is at risk of being breached.

Answer

Set the internal SLO identical to the SLA at 99.9% so engineering and legal commitments are perfectly aligned and easy to report.

Answer

Set the internal SLO looser than the SLA (e.g., 99.5%) to preserve a larger error budget and maximize release velocity.

Answer

Do not define an internal SLO; monitor the SLA compliance directly and only respond when penalties are triggered.