Question

Your team runs a payments API with a 99.9% availability SLO measured over a rolling 28-day window. Halfway through the current window, a single 45-minute outage has already consumed roughly 90% of the error budget for the period. The product team wants to ship a large feature release this week that touches the payment authorization path, while the on-call engineer has flagged three recurring alerts that require manual intervention each week. As the SRE lead, how should you prioritize the team's work for the remainder of the window?

Accepted Answer

Pause risky feature releases affecting the authorization path and direct engineering effort toward reliability work and reducing the recurring manual-intervention toil until the budget recovers.

Answer

Proceed with the feature release on schedule, since SLO windows reset and the remaining 10% budget is still available for use.

Answer

Immediately tighten the SLO to 99.99% so the outage appears smaller relative to a larger overall budget and the release can continue.

Answer

Ignore the error budget signal and let the product team decide release timing, since error budgets are only advisory metrics.