Error Budget
The amount of unreliability permitted by a service-level objective over a defined measurement period, commonly used to balance feature velocity and operational risk.
Reliability Context
An error budget converts an SLO into the amount of unreliability that can be tolerated during a measurement window. For example, a 99.9% success objective leaves roughly 0.1% of events outside the target, and the burn rate can guide release or incident decisions.
Governance Boundary
An error budget is not a quota of failures that should deliberately be consumed. It is a quantitative decision framework for balancing reliability risk against the pace of change.
Related Reliability Concepts
- Service Level Objective
- Service Level Indicator
- Burn Rate
- Reliability