Meaning
Service Level Agreement; a legally binding contract between a service provider and a customer outlining agreed performance and availability standards.
Three examples from work
Contract negotiation
ClientWhat financial penalties apply if you breach the 99.9% uptime SLA?
Account ExecutiveWe provide service fee credits proportional to the outage duration.
Support escalation
Support LeadThis critical ticket has a two-hour response time SLA.
On-call DevI'm already investigating the database connection errors.
Operations review
DirectorDid we meet all customer SLAs during last month's AWS disruption?
DevOpsYes, our automated multi-cloud failover prevented any breach.
Pronounce each letter: 'S-L-A'. An SLA has financial or contractual consequences, which distinguishes it from internal SLO targets.