Comparison
Error budgetvsService level objective
Error budget
your SLO allows 0.1 percent failure, you have used 80 percent of that this month, and the risky migration now waits.
The permitted amount of unreliability implied by an SLO, treated as a spendable resource. It reframes reliability as a budget rather than a binary: you are allowed failures, and how you spend them is a choice. Its value is entirely in the policy attached — what actually changes when it is exhausted.
Full entry →Service level objective
you commit internally to 99.9 percent of requests succeeding over 30 days, and you now have a number that says when to stop shipping features.
A target for an SLI over a time window. Its real function is decision-making: it converts "is reliability good enough" from an argument into arithmetic. An SLO nobody is willing to act on — by slowing releases or prioritising reliability work — is a dashboard, not an objective.
Full entry →