Question

Your team owns a payments API with a quarterly SLO of 99.9% availability. Six weeks into the quarter, a series of unrelated outages has consumed 95% of the error budget. Product management is pushing to ship three new revenue features in the remaining time, but the SRE team is concerned about further reliability degradation. According to SRE principles, what is the most appropriate way to resolve this tension?

Accepted Answer

Follow the pre-agreed error budget policy, which should specify that once the budget is nearly exhausted, feature releases are deprioritized in favor of reliability work until the budget recovers.

Answer

Loosen the SLO target to 99.5% for the current quarter so the remaining error budget is large enough to accommodate the planned feature launches.

Answer

Let product management override the SRE concern since revenue features take precedence, and re-evaluate reliability next quarter.

Answer

Immediately declare a permanent feature freeze on the service and reassign the entire team to on-call rotation.