1 min lesson
SLOs, SLIs and error budgets
Take this situation: "An interviewer asks how an error budget changes what your team does week to week. Give a concrete answer." Lead with your decision, then add the reason.
Step 1 of 2
SLOs, SLIs and error budgetsan objective bar the team manages to
An SLI is the measurement (delivery success rate). An SLO is the target you commit to (99.9% of events delivered within 30s). The error budget is what's left over - the 0.1% you're allowed to miss. That budget is a management tool, not just a metric.
Why an EM reaches for an error budget
- Budget healthy
- Ship faster, take more risk on changes - you have room.
- Budget burning fast
- Freeze risky deploys, redirect the team to reliability work.
- The real value
- It turns "how reliable is enough?" from an argument into a number the whole team agrees to in advance.
Error budgets convert reliability from opinion into a shared, objective bar - which is how you lead a team to it instead of relitigating it every sprint.