Leadership Intelligence
Platform Team SLA Template
Define clear Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to set expectations with product teams and stakeholders about platform availability, support, and feature delivery.
Infrastructure Availability SLAs
Platform Uptime Commitment
Target: 99.95% uptime (maximum ~22 minutes downtime per month)
Scope: Core platform services including CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes clusters, service mesh, secrets management, and observability infrastructure.
Measurement: Calculated as % of time all critical platform services are operational and accessible.
Exclusions:
- Scheduled maintenance windows (announced 5 business days in advance)
- Third-party service outages beyond platform team's control (e.g., cloud provider outages)
- Incidents caused by product team misconfigurations
Deployment Pipeline Availability
Target: 99.9% uptime during business hours (8am-8pm ET, Mon-Fri)
Scope: CI/CD pipelines, artifact registries, deployment automation tools.
Consequence: If SLA missed, platform team will provide root cause analysis within 48 hours and remediation plan within 5 business days.
Support Response SLAs
| Severity | Definition | Response Time | Resolution Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| P0 Critical | Complete platform outage blocking all production deployments | 15 minutes | 2 hours |
| P1 High | Partial platform degradation affecting multiple teams or critical workflows | 1 hour | 4 hours |
| P2 Medium | Single team blocked or non-critical feature unavailable | 4 business hours | 2 business days |
| P3 Low | Questions, feature requests, documentation improvements | 1 business day | 5 business days |
Support Hours
On-call coverage: 24/7 for P0/P1 incidents
Standard support: Monday-Friday, 8am-6pm ET (P2/P3 requests)
Office hours: Every Wednesday, 2pm-4pm ET for drop-in questions and pairing sessions
Feature Request SLAs
Triage & Prioritization
Initial review: All feature requests triaged within 3 business days
Prioritization framework:
- Impact: How many teams/engineers affected?
- Urgency: What's the business cost of delay?
- Effort: Small (1-3 days), Medium (1-2 weeks), Large (2+ weeks)
Commitment: Platform roadmap published quarterly with feature estimates
Communication Cadence
Status updates: All in-progress features receive biweekly status updates via Slack or email
Delivery estimates: Platform team provides delivery estimate within 5 business days of prioritization
Launch announcements: All major features announced via #platform-updates Slack channel and monthly all-hands
Onboarding SLAs
| Activity | Timeline | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Initial platform orientation session | Within 2 business days of request | Platform team |
| Development environment setup assistance | Within 1 business day of request | Platform team (pairing session) |
| First production deployment (with support) | Within 5 business days of onboarding start | Platform + Product team |
| Follow-up check-in | 1 week after first deployment | Platform team |
Change Management SLAs
Planned Maintenance
Notification: Minimum 5 business days advance notice for planned downtime
Window: Maintenance performed during low-traffic periods (typically Saturday 2am-6am ET)
Communication: Detailed change plan shared via email and Slack #platform-updates
Breaking Changes
Deprecation notice: Minimum 90 days before removing deprecated features
Migration support: Platform team provides migration guides and pairing sessions
Backward compatibility: Platform maintains backward compatibility for minimum 6 months unless security-critical
Measurement & Reporting
Monthly SLA reports: Published first Monday of each month, including:
- Actual uptime vs. target
- Incident count by severity
- Mean time to response (MTTR) and mean time to resolution (MTTR)
- Feature delivery metrics (planned vs. delivered)
Quarterly business reviews: Presented to VP Eng and CTO, covering:
- SLA performance trends
- Top 5 platform pain points from product teams
- Roadmap alignment with business goals
- Cost optimization and ROI metrics
SLA Violations & Remediation
If SLA missed:
- Notification: VP Eng and affected teams notified within 24 hours
- Root cause analysis: Completed within 5 business days
- Remediation plan: Action items with owners and timelines shared within 10 business days
- Retrospective: Blameless postmortem conducted for P0/P1 SLA violations
Continuous improvement: SLAs reviewed and adjusted quarterly based on platform maturity and organizational needs.
Real-World SLA Violation Examples
Learn from actual scenarios showing how platform teams handle SLA violations, communicate with stakeholders, and implement lasting improvements: