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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

Service Discovery
A mechanism that automatically detects and tracks the network locations of service instances in distributed systems.
Docker Compose
A tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications using a YAML configuration file.
Container Registry
A storage and distribution service for container images, similar to a package repository but for Docker images.
Feature Flag
A technique that allows enabling or disabling features in production without deploying new code, enabling safe rollouts and A/B testing.
SonarQube
A platform for continuous code quality inspection that detects bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells through static analysis.
Blue-Green Deployment
A deployment strategy using two identical environments where traffic is switched from the old version to the new one instantly.
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