An SLA of 100% simply means you agree to compensate your customers (as specified, usually with credit) if your service is down at all, nothing more.
Also, SRE here but not for Cloudflare -- I've never seen SREs directly involved in externally published SLAs, they usually come from legal. We deal with SLOs on more fine grained SLIs than overall uptime
SRE - Site Reliability Engineer (a term Google came up with that's been adopted elsewhere) Google defined it approximately as what happens when you apply software engineering practices to what was traditionally an operations function.
SLO - Service Level Objective - the service level you strive for. If it's higher you have room for experimentation, etc.
SLI - Service Level Indicator - the actual metric(s) you use to measure a service level (latency, error rate, throughput, etc.)
SLA - correct. That’s the contract between the operator and the users which describes the penalties for not meeting agreed-upon SLO
SLO - service level objective, the stated availability (or latency or durability etc) of the service. Usually expressed as a value over a period of time (e.g 99.9% availability as measured over a moving 30 average). The SLO is measured by the SLI.
SLI - service level indicator. Simply, the direct measurement of the service (i.e metrics)
SRE - Site Reliability Engineer, usually a member of a team who is responsible for the continued availability of the service and the poor sap who gets paged when it breaches SLO or has an outage or other impactful event.
I'm not sure you and your parent understand what an SLA means. It's an agreement that, when broken, incurs a penalty.
They aren't saying they guarantee 100% uptime. They're saying they'll pay you for any downtime. It's literally the 3rd paragraph:
> 1.2 Penalties. If the Service fails to meet the above service level, the Customer will receive a credit equal to the result of the Service Credit calculation in Section 6 of this SLA.
(Most people I know consider them meaningless marketing BS that's really just meant to trick people or satisfy some make-work checkbox)
> Cloudflare ("Company") commits to provide a level of service for Business Customers demonstrating: [...] 100% Uptime. The Service will serve Customer Content 100% of the time without qualification.
This is a legal commitment to provide 100% uptime. They are guaranteeing 100% uptime and defining penalties for failing to meet that guarantee. The fact that a penalty is defined does not stop it from being a guarantee.
No, this SLA is a legal commitment to give you credits when Service uptime falls below a certain threshold. The threshold could be anything - 99%, 50%, 100%, etc. Importantly, Cloudflare is not under a legal obligation to provide the Service at or above the agreed threshold, it's under a legal obligation to give you Credits when the Service uptime is below that threshold.
"Service Credits are Customer’s sole and exclusive remedy for any violation of this SLA."
> This is a legal commitment to provide 100% uptime. They are guaranteeing 100% uptime
I don't think you know what a guarantee is.
For example when you buy a new car you get a guarantee that it won't break down. Are they claiming it won't break down? No, of course not. What a guarantee means is that they'll fix it or compensate you if it does.
Looks like it supports parent opinion:
commit - bind to a certain course if policy. It's legal obligation, not a statement about guarantees in physical world (like "this alloy won't melt below t°C")
I completely can understand your emotion. But even the top CDNs can have outages of some form or the other. If site uptime is important, check out https://www.cdnreserve.com/ - it's built on the design principle that the likelihood of two separate platforms having an outage at the same time is close to zero.
Also, SRE here but not for Cloudflare -- I've never seen SREs directly involved in externally published SLAs, they usually come from legal. We deal with SLOs on more fine grained SLIs than overall uptime