Question

Your SRE team supports a payments API. Product managers want to ship a large batch of features quickly, while the on-call team reports frequent reliability regressions after each release. Leadership asks you to establish an objective, pre-agreed mechanism that governs how much feature-shipping risk is acceptable and what happens when reliability degrades. Which approach best satisfies this need?

Accepted Answer

Define an SLO with an associated error budget and codify an error budget policy that specifies agreed consequences (e.g., release freezes) when the budget is exhausted.

Answer

Increase the SLO target to 100% availability so that any regression is immediately visible and all releases are blocked until fixed.

Answer

Have the on-call engineer decide case-by-case whether each release should proceed based on the current dashboard state.

Answer

Ask product managers to reduce the number of features per release and rely on manual code review to catch reliability issues.