What Is An Error Budget, And How Should It Guide Release Decisions?

Grokking Scalable Systems for Interviews

Ask Author

Back to course home

0% completed

Vote For New Content

What Is An Error Budget, And How Should It Guide Release Decisions?

An error budget is the allowable amount of downtime or failures a service can tolerate within a given period without breaking its reliability targets, essentially acting as a buffer that balances system reliability and the pace of innovation.

In practice, an error budget is defined based on a service’s reliability goals (often expressed as a Service Level Objective, or SLO) – it’s essentially 100% minus the SLO.

For example, if a service has an SLO of 99.9% uptime, the remaining 0.1% is the error budget (about 43 minutes of downtime allowed per month in this case).

.....

.....

.....

Like the course? Get enrolled and start learning!