Operations & workflows · Business & strategy · Software engineering
Error budget.
The amount of unreliability permitted by a service’s reliability objective over a defined period.
Useful when balancing delivery speed with reliability work.
“Define an error budget from the availability objective and use its consumption to guide release decisions.”
A closer look
A target of 99.9% successful requests allows a 0.1% failure fraction over its measurement window. The exact indicator and period matter. Teams can use the remaining allowance to agree when to prioritize reliability instead of debating risk without a shared measure.
Put it to work
“Explain how the incident consumed the monthly error budget before recommending another rollout.”
A useful distinction
An error budget is a reliability allowance, not permission to ignore errors or a financial budget for repairs.