One of the most versatile and foundational SRE tools is the SLO, or service level objective. The SLO is a threshold set for key reliability metrics. When incidents push the metric over the threshold, a response launches to prevent further damage. Conversely, as long as you meet your SLO, you can continue to ship new code. The space you have before you breach this threshold is the error budget. When evaluating new developments, you can judge if the error budget can accommodate the potential risk of unreliability.
We generally think of the error budget as a tool for developers. It helps them understand tradeoffs between development velocity and reliability. But error budgets can be helpful to many roles throughout the organization. In this blog post, we’ll look at how error budgets can help cross-functional teams across the organization such as QA, legal, executives, and more. We’ll also look at ways engineers can use error budgets beyond development planning.