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Error Budget

An error budget quantifies acceptable unreliability based on SLO targets, balancing reliability and velocity.

What is an Error Budget?

An error budget is the amount of unreliability your service can tolerate while still meeting its SLO—the difference between 100% and your reliability target (e.g., 99.9% SLO = 0.1% error budget).

Error budget usage

If budget remains, ship features faster. If budget depleted, focus on reliability.

Common misconceptions

  • "Error budget encourages failures" — Enables informed risk-taking
  • "Depleted budget means stop everything" — Policy determines response
  • "Error budgets replace SLAs" — Internal tool, SLAs are external