Error Budget

Definition

The allowable amount of unreliability (1 - SLO) a service can spend on change and risk.

Why it matters

Balances speed and stability: when budgets are depleted, teams focus on reliability improvements.

Common pitfalls

• Treating budgets as hard bans rather than triggers for prioritization.
• Ignoring budget burn analysis (what consumed it?).

References

• Google SRE Book
• manual/04-platform-engineering/index.md