SLO
In plain terms
An internal target for a service's reliability or performance.
Going deeper
A Service Level Objective is the goal a team aims for (e.g., 99.9% of requests succeed), guiding engineering decisions and error budgets. It's usually stricter than the customer-facing SLA.
Under the hood
Paired with an error budget that quantifies acceptable unreliability; burning the budget can freeze risky releases. Measured via SLIs.
Examples
99.95% of requests under 300ms, internal targets stricter than the customer SLA.
Think of it like...
Like an athlete's personal training target set tougher than the qualifying standard, to ensure they comfortably make the cut.