SLA Design - Creating Meaningful Service Agreements
Issue #129: System Design Interview Roadmap • Reliability & Resilience
Working Code Demo:
Your payment service just went down for 12 minutes during Black Friday. Your CEO is furious, customers are leaving angry reviews, but your monitoring shows 99.95% uptime for the month. Sound familiar? The disconnect between what you measure and what customers experience reveals the hidden complexity of meaningful SLA design.
Most engineers think SLAs are just uptime percentages, but that's like judging a restaurant by how often the lights are on. Real SLA design requires understanding the intricate relationship between what you measure (SLIs), what you promise (SLOs), and what you're legally bound to deliver (SLAs).
What We'll Master Today
Transform SLI metrics into customer-meaningful SLOs
Design multi-tier SLA structures that align with business value
Implement error budgets that prevent both over-engineering and under-delivery
Build cascading SLA dependencies across service boundaries
The SLA Pyramid: From Metrics to Promises
