Question

Your team runs a payments API with a monthly availability SLO of 99.9%, calculated over a 30-day rolling window. Two weeks into the current window, an unplanned outage has already consumed 80% of the month's error budget. The product team wants to ship a large batch of risky new features immediately to hit a marketing deadline. As the SRE lead, and following Google SRE principles for balancing velocity and reliability, what is the most appropriate recommendation?

Accepted Answer

Slow the release cadence and prioritize reliability work, deferring or reducing the scope of risky changes until the error budget recovers, per the pre-agreed error budget policy.

Answer

Proceed with the full feature release as planned, since the SLO has not yet been formally breached and the budget is not fully exhausted.

Answer

Permanently raise the SLO target to 99.99% so that future outages consume a smaller percentage of the error budget.

Answer

Ignore the error budget for this window and rely on post-incident reviews after the deadline to decide whether reliability work is needed.