Operations also: Service Level Objective

SLO

A target for an SLI (latency, availability).

In plain terms

Internal commitment, looser than SLA. Tied to error budget — burn it slowly or roll back.

Origin

Google SRE book (Beyer et al., 2016) formalised SLI/SLO/SLA as a stack. Originated inside Google with Ben Treynor's SRE team in the mid-2000s.

Where it shows up in production

Google SRE error budgets 99.95% availability SLO = 21.6 min downtime/month budget. Burn it slowly or roll back.
GitHub, Stripe public SLOs Both publish SLOs and burn-rate alerting; widely cited reference implementations.

Sources & further reading

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