Model Serving & Economics
Service-level agreement
SLA
A formal commitment about service availability, performance, or support.
Example
An SLA promises 99.9% monthly availability and defines remedies when the target is missed.
Why it matters
It gives customers a written basis for judging service commitments and resolving failures.
You'll hear it
“What does the agreement promise if the service goes down?”
Can you control it?
Set by the team
The people building or running the AI choose this setup. An everyday user generally needs their help to change how this part works.
Common questions
- Does it guarantee every answer is correct?
- Usually no. Availability commitments and answer accuracy are different matters.
- Are planned maintenance periods always counted as downtime?
- Not necessarily. Agreements may exclude them or define specific conditions for counting an outage.
- Does a credit cover all losses from an outage?
- Do not assume so. The agreement sets the available remedies and their limits.