SLA (Service Level Agreement)
An SLA is a formal commitment between a provider and its customers that defines the expected level of service — often an availability target — along with how it's measured and what happens if it isn't met.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contractual promise about the level of service a provider will deliver, most often expressed as an availability target such as 99.9% uptime over a period. A complete SLA also specifies how the metric is measured, the measurement window, any exclusions (like scheduled maintenance), and the remedy — often service credits — if the target is missed.
SLAs are the externally binding layer; teams typically set stricter internal SLOs to stay safely ahead of them, using the error budget as the gap.
To translate an availability percentage into allowed downtime per month or year, try the SLA uptime calculator.
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