Error Budget

Noun · Development

Definitions

  1. The allowed amount of unreliability based on SLO targets — if your SLO is 99.9% availability, your error budget is 0.1% (about 43 minutes per month). When the error budget is spent, teams slow down deployments and focus on reliability. When there's budget remaining, teams can move fast and take risks. Balances innovation against reliability.

    In plain English: The amount of downtime you're allowed to have — spend it on deploying features, save it when reliability is at risk.

    Example: "We've used 80% of our error budget this month — no risky deploys until it resets. Focus on fixing the flaky integration."

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