Architecture & practice·Incidents and what happens after
the budget was spent in the first week of the quarter, and feature work stopped until reliability caught up.
Error budget policy
Also callederror budget as a negotiating instrument, budget burn policy
The agreement, made in advance, about what happens when the error budget implied by an objective is exhausted. Without it an error budget is a dashboard; with it, it is a pre-negotiated answer to the reliability-versus-features argument that would otherwise be had under pressure and won by whoever is loudest. The policy is the product — the number was never the point.