Daily Term: Error Budget

Error Budget

An Error Budget quantifies the acceptable amount of downtime or errors for a service, based on its SLO. For example, if an SLO targets 99.9% uptime, the error budget allows 43.2 minutes of downtime per month. Error budgets balance reliability and innovation: if the budget is exhausted, teams might pause new releases to focus on stability. This approach aligns development and operations but requires careful monitoring and agreement on priorities.

Date: 2025-09-14