Error budget: if your SLO is 99.9% availability, the 0.1% of allowed failure over a window is the budget you can spend on risk, releases, and experiments.
2 / 5
What typically happens when the error budget is exhausted?
Budget policy: burning through the budget triggers a slowdown or freeze on feature releases until reliability is restored, aligning incentives between dev and ops.
3 / 5
How does an error budget relate to an SLO?
SLO link: the SLO sets the reliability target; the error budget quantifies how much failure that target permits, making the trade-off explicit and measurable.
4 / 5
What is a burn rate?
Burn rate: a multiplier indicating how quickly the budget is depleting; a burn rate of 2 means you would exhaust the budget in half the SLO window. Fast burns trigger urgent alerts.
5 / 5
Why are error budgets useful for prioritization?
Prioritization: a data-driven budget replaces subjective arguments, letting teams ship aggressively when budget remains and invest in stability when it runs low.