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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

Artifact
A packaged, versioned output of a build process — such as a Docker image, JAR file, or compiled binary — ready for deployment.
API Gateway
A server that acts as the single entry point for API requests, handling routing, authentication, rate limiting, and monitoring.
Git
A distributed version control system that tracks changes in source code during software development.
Configuration Management
The practice of systematically managing and maintaining consistent server configurations across infrastructure.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
The practice of managing infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes.
Health Check
An endpoint or mechanism that reports whether an application is running correctly and ready to handle requests.
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