Comparison
Freshness SLAvsService level objective
Freshness SLA
the agreement says this table is never more than three hours behind, so a four-hour delay is a breach rather than an opinion.
A stated commitment about how current a dataset will be, agreed with the people who depend on it. Its value is that it converts an unbounded expectation into a number that can be measured, alerted on and occasionally renegotiated. Without one, every delay is a conversation from first principles, and the pipeline team ends up defending latency numbers nobody ever agreed to.
Full entry →Service level objective
you commit internally to 99.9 percent of requests succeeding over 30 days, and you now have a number that says when to stop shipping features.
A target for an SLI over a time window. Its real function is decision-making: it converts "is reliability good enough" from an argument into arithmetic. An SLO nobody is willing to act on — by slowing releases or prioritising reliability work — is a dashboard, not an objective.
Full entry →