[rwiggins]

There is some nuance there. Because SLA violations typically have real-money impact, they're often backed by internal objectives (SLOs) that are quite a bit tighter. So if an API promises four nines of availability in its SLA, there is probably an internal target that's at least four-and-a-half nines, if not five.

Which is to say, I would not be surprised if many APIs with a four-nines SLA were actually closer to five nines.

From a planning perspective, you should probably stick to the public guarantees (i.e. the SLA), though. Although things can always go horribly wrong, like in the big Atlassian deletion snafu recently.

[citizenpaul]

I'm saying SRE/SLA has become a commodity. No one thinks about it. They just expect the systems to be up. The article is about how SRE can be more than "downtime" I propose it cannot and they are wrong.