Question

A SaaS company's platform team has defined a service level objective (SLO) of 99.9% availability for its checkout service. Over the past month, the service has consumed only a small fraction of its allotted error budget, and the reliability metrics are well within target. The product managers are pushing to release several new features quickly, but the operations team is hesitant to introduce change. According to Google's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, how should the team use the error budget to guide this decision?

Accepted Answer

Because ample error budget remains, the team can safely accelerate the release of new features, accepting the added risk of change.

Answer

The team should halt all feature releases until the error budget is fully replenished to 100% at the end of the quarter.

Answer

The team should lower the SLO to 99.99% so that any remaining error budget is consumed before releasing features.

Answer

The team should ignore the error budget and base the release decision solely on the product managers' business priorities.