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Comment by dxf | Hacker News Reader

>Are SLAs even real?

SLI: Some metric you use to measure a thing (e.g. uptime, latency, etc.)

SLO: Some objective you try to hit, as measured by the SLI (e.g. "99.99% of requests are processed within 3 seconds)

SLA: A promise to a customer that they will meet some SLO, and consequences if they don't. If there aren't consequences for not meeting the SLO, then measuring and tracking the metrics is a pointless exercise.

The SLA is "real" to the extent Atlassian is adhering to any listed consequences.

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Most SLAs say "if we miss this, you get time for free" which means that these companies will hopefully get a refund ... for the time they can't use the service.

SLAs are mostly aspirational.

Cars warranties are also aspirational/virtue signaling, to a point.

If the maintenance costs exceed the margins on the cars you lose money. Do that on too many product lines for too often and you’re looking at bankruptcy. But some makers clearly are more risk averse than others, so a 6 year warranty from maker X does not translate to a 7 year warranty from maker Y.

But Atlassian's (published*) SLA offers a credit of at most 50% of the month.. not really the same as a manufacturer warranty on a car, which the costs of servicing could easily exceed the price paid for the car.

* - their larger customers will have negotiated SLAs.

edit: to be clear, I expect Atlassian will offer concessions beyond their SLA obligations. I'm only responding to the comparison.

The linked article directly talks about this, at this level of downtime customers are promised a 50% discount. That's what the SLA means, effectively

> and consequences if they don't.

And these consequences usually just amount to getting some percentage of your service fees back. I'm sure the affected customers will get their entire monthly Atlassian Cloud fees back. Since this is so severe maybe Atlassian will even give them credits for some # of free months.

But there's no way the amount they'll get from Atlassian is going to come close to what they're losing in productivity by not having access to Jira & Confluence. At my company, getting an entire free year of Jira wouldn't be worth Jira being inaccessible for a week.

Does that indicate it would be preferable to pay more for a more reliable solution, if such a thing were to exist? Although, it definitely would be hard to quantify 'more reliable' there.

You could use it as a material breach of the contract and possibly get out of any arrangement you have with Atlassian.

A typical SLA precludes that by specifying the remedy for noncompliance with the performance measure. Only if they fail to apply the remedy is there a material breach. For a month-to-month SLA, this limits liability to one month's subscription, as agreed in black-and-white.

Customers that demand service level agreements often fail to recognise that they cut both ways.

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