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DevOps & Automation · Advanced

Error Budget Policy

An agreed set of actions a team takes when a service consumes or exhausts its error budget.

Definition

The policy is negotiated between product and SRE teams in advance so that decisions are not made under pressure. Typical actions include freezing non-critical releases, prioritizing reliability fixes, or requiring a postmortem when a single incident consumes a large share of the budget.

Example

Policy: if more than 20% of the quarterly budget is burned by one incident, a postmortem with P0 action items is mandatory.

Exam tip

The policy is agreed before incidents happen and is enforced by stakeholders together, not unilaterally by SRE.

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