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

An endpoint or mechanism that reports whether an application is running correctly and ready to handle requests.

Infrastructure Drift

The divergence between the actual state of infrastructure and its defined desired state, caused by manual changes or untracked modifications.

Immutable Deployment

A deployment strategy where new versions replace existing instances entirely rather than updating them in place.

An open-source container orchestration platform that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications.

Kubernetes Secret

A Kubernetes object for storing sensitive data like passwords, tokens, and certificates, with base64 encoding and optional encryption at rest.

Chaos Engineering

The discipline of deliberately introducing failures into a system to test its resilience and identify weaknesses before they cause outages.

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