SLO

Using Error Budgets to Balance Reliability and Change

Teams often agree that reliability matters and still struggle to decide what to do when reliability competes with product work. Should a risky release proceed? Should engineers stop feature work after a bad incident? Is one failed request enough to justify a freeze? Without a shared rule, these decisions can become arguments between vague goals: “move faster” versus “make it more reliable.” An error budget turns a reliability target into a limited allowance for unsuccessful service. The budget does not make failures desirable. It makes the acceptable amount of unreliability explicit so a team can reason about risk and change using the same constraint.