A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Service Level Agreements Come Back Around As SLA4OAI," Kin Lane, November 3, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/03/service-level-agreements-come-back-around-as-sla4oai/
Marisol read the post on a Tuesday between two meetings, the way she read most things, half expecting to skim it. She is a platform engineer at a company that sells scheduling software to freight brokers, and she maintains the public API there. She stopped skimming at the list of what the author had asked for over twelve years. The 2014 request for a "service accord" made her smile, because she had been trying to write one for her own customers for months and kept ending up with legal paragraphs nobody read.
The YAML example was where she slowed down. Plans, rates per path and per method, a base plan that the others inherit from. It was close to the spreadsheet she already kept in a corner of the team wiki, the one that listed which customers got which limits. She had never thought of it as a format. She had thought of it as homework.
Then the numbers. Of 7,108 documents, "only 92 providers promise an uptime level on their own SLA page". She felt a small, unwelcome recognition. Her company's pricing page says 99.9 percent, in a bullet, in a font size meant to be skimmed. Nothing behind that bullet is a document anyone could point to. The post was careful about the difference between a promise and a self-report, and she realized her company had been blurring the two on purpose or by neglect. She could not tell which.
She did not agree with all of it. The post says the uptime promise has no standard home and is carried in an extension called "x-apis-io-guarantees". To her that sounded like a fix being sold as a feature. A specification that cannot express how reliable a service is seemed to have missed the one thing a customer asks about first. She also noted that the repository was last updated in February 2023, and she wondered how comfortable she would be telling her director to build on something that quiet. The post admitted all of this openly, which annoyed her slightly, because it left her nothing to push back on except her own reluctance.
The line she kept returning to was the advice at the end, to "keep doing the hard work, and make it open source". She was not sure it applied to her. Her job was not to be early on anything. But she thought about her wiki spreadsheet and how many people would have to ask her before they could see it.
She did not decide to adopt a standard. That was a bigger conversation, with legal in the room, and she was not going to pretend otherwise. What she did was smaller. She opened a new file and, following the shape of the example in the post, wrote out two of her company's plans with their request limits per path and their monthly prices. She left the uptime out entirely, because she could not stand behind a number she had not checked with anyone.
It took forty minutes. She saved it to a branch, wrote a one-line note to her team lead asking whether the limits were right, and closed the laptop without sending anything further.