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DevOps Intermediate

What is Error Budget?

The acceptable amount of unreliability allowed for a service, calculated as 100% minus the Service Level Objective.

An error budget quantifies how much downtime or errors a service can tolerate. For example, a 99.9% availability SLO gives an error budget of 0.1%, translating to about 8.76 hours per year or 43.8 minutes per month. Teams can spend this budget on risky deployments, experiments, and new features. When the budget is depleted, the team shifts focus to reliability improvements. This framework turns the tension between development speed and stability into a data-driven conversation, removing subjective arguments about when to slow down or speed up releases.

Related Terms

Incident Management
The process of detecting, responding to, and resolving service disruptions to minimize impact and restore normal operations.
Jenkins
An open-source automation server for building, testing, and deploying software through configurable CI/CD pipelines.
Message Queue
A communication mechanism that enables asynchronous message passing between services, decoupling producers from consumers.
Container Registry
A storage and distribution service for container images, similar to a package repository but for Docker images.
API Gateway
A server that acts as the single entry point for API requests, handling routing, authentication, rate limiting, and monitoring.
Observability
The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs through metrics, logs, and traces.
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