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DevOps & Automation · Intermediate

Error Budget

The allowable amount of unreliability for a service, equal to 100% minus the SLO, which teams can spend on releases and risk.

Definition

If an SLO is 99.9% availability over 30 days, the error budget is 0.1%, roughly 43 minutes of downtime. While budget remains, teams can ship features quickly; when it is exhausted, an error budget policy typically shifts effort to reliability work.

Example

A 99.95% monthly SLO yields an error budget of about 21.6 minutes of downtime per 30 days.

Exam tip

Be ready to calculate budget minutes from an SLO; also know that exhausting the budget triggers the policy, not automatic SLA penalties.

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