Question

Your team runs a payment API with a 99.9% availability SLO. Leadership wants error budget consumption to influence weekly release-freeze decisions, but developers complain that a single bad day early in the quarter blocks releases for weeks even after reliability recovers. You currently measure the SLO against a fixed calendar-quarter window that resets every three months. Which change best addresses the developers' concern while still enforcing the error budget policy?

Accepted Answer

Switch to a rolling 28-day measurement window so that older failures age out and the budget reflects recent reliability.

Answer

Loosen the SLO target from 99.9% to 99.5% to provide a larger error budget each quarter.

Answer

Keep the calendar-quarter window but manually reset the error budget whenever developers report the freeze is unfair.

Answer

Remove the release-freeze policy and rely solely on postmortems to drive reliability improvements.