An SLA (service level agreement) is a contract between a cloud service provider and a cloud customer that defines the expected level of service, performance, availability, and reliability of the cloud service. An SLA also specifies the contractually allowed downtime for a cloud-hosted application, which is the maximum amount of time that the application can be unavailable or inaccessible without violating the SLA. The contractually allowed downtime is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime, such as 99.9% or 99.99%, which corresponds to a certain number of hours or minutes per year, month, week, or day. For example, an SLA with 99.9% uptime means that the cloud service can be down for up to 8.76 hours per year, or .8 minutes per month, or 10.1 minutes per week, or 1.44 minutes per day. If the cloud service provider fails to meet the SLA, the cloud customer may be entitled to compensation or other remedies, such as credits, refunds, or termination of the contract.