Error Budget
An error budget is the amount of unreliability you are allowed before breaching your SLO — the gap between your target and 100%.
If your SLO is 99.9% over 30 days, your error budget is 0.1% — about 43 minutes of downtime. As incidents consume that budget, the remainder tells you how much risk you can still take.
Error budgets turn reliability into a shared, data-driven decision: budget left means you can ship faster; budget spent means it is time to slow down and stabilise.
Related terms
SLO (Service Level Objective)A Service Level Objective (SLO) is an internal target for a reliability metric — for example SLA (Service Level Agreement)A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contractual commitment to a level of service — most commonly a guaranteed uptime percentage — with consequences if it is missed.DowntimeDowntime is any period during which a service is unavailable or not responding correctly to its users.
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