Error Budget
The amount of unreliability permitted while still meeting a service level objective.
Plain English
How much failure the service can afford before missing its goal.
In context
An error budget helps balance release velocity with reliability work using the remaining tolerance in an SLO window.
Example
“The error budget is nearly exhausted so risky launches are paused.”
When you'll hear this
- release planning
- SLO review
- incident prioritization
Common misunderstanding
An error budget is not a target amount of failure to intentionally consume.
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-25
