SLA Definition
1 min read
Define measurable availability, latency, and throughput targets before designing.
Define measurable availability, latency, and throughput targets before choosing any technology. Every SLA drives a design decision.
How It Works
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are the quantitative contract between your system and its users. Define them early: availability (99.9% = 8.7h downtime/year, 99.99% = 52min/year), latency (p50, p95, p99 targets), throughput (requests/second at peak), and durability (data loss tolerance). Each SLA drives design decisions — 99.99% availability requires multi-region replication.
Real-World Example
Stripe defines its payment API SLA as 99.999% availability for charge creation with p99 latency under 1 second. This extreme availability target drives their multi-datacenter active-active architecture with synchronous replication.
Test Yourself
Scenario: You are designing two services at the same company: an internal analytics dashboard used by 200 employees, and a consumer checkout service used by 5M customers. Define the SLOs for each and show how the SLO shapes the architecture.
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