Chaos Budget

Noun · Development

Definitions

  1. The amount of risk a team is willing to take with chaos experiments, analogous to error budgets. When reliability is high (error budget surplus), the chaos budget allows more aggressive failure injection. When reliability is low (error budget nearly exhausted), chaos experiments are paused. Balances the need to find weaknesses with the risk of causing real outages.

    In plain English: How much room you have to safely run chaos experiments without risking real user impact.

    Example: "We have 90% of our error budget remaining — plenty of chaos budget to run the multi-region failover test during business hours."

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