“I want all teams to set SLAs between each other”, said the leadership.
💭 And I thought to myself: “What are you smoking? I want some of that too! It must be good! What do you mean SLA between teams? Unless one team is literally paying the salary of another team and can take them to court in case of a breach, we’re talking about SLO, not SLA”!
SLA = Service Level Agreement
SLO = Service Level Objective
To the untrained eye, the difference is very subtle: just one vowel! Many people, including self-proclaimed SREs use SLA and SLO interchangeably.
🧐 But once you know the difference, statements like the one I quoted becomes ridiculously funny.
When I’m hiring SREs, asking the difference between SLA and SLO is my favorite “trick question” because it reveals nuanced knowledge about how reliability is communicated.
This short post covers:
Why does this distinction matter?
An illustration to build a memorable base
Quotes from Google’s books
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