service-level objectives ensure reliability. Generally, service level objectives are important because they help teams achieve the following:

Improve software quality : Service level objectives help teams define an acceptable level of downtime for a service or a particular issue. SLOs can shine light on issues that fall short of a full-blown incident, but also don’t fully meet expectations. Achieving 100% reliability isn’t always realistic, so using SLOs can help you figure out the balance between innovating (which could result in downtime) and delivering (which ensures users are happy).

Help with decision making : SLOs can be a great way for DevOps and infrastructure teams to use data and performance expectations to make decisions, such as whether to release, and where engineers should focus their time.

Promote automation : Stable, well-calibrated SLOs pave the way for teams to automate more processes and testing throughout the software delivery life cycle (SDLC). With reliable SLOs, you can set up automation to monitor and measure SLIs and set alerts if certain indicators are trending toward violation. This consistency enables teams to calibrate performance during development and detect issues before SLOs are actually violated.

Avoid downtime : It is inevitable that software can break. SLOs allow DevOps teams to predict the problems before they occur and especially before they impact customers. By shifting production-level SLOs left into development, you can design apps to meet production SLOs to increase resilience and reliability far before there is actual downtime. This trains your teams to be proactive in maintaining software quality and saves you money by avoiding downtime.