What happens operationally when an error budget is exhausted? [Basic]
Answer
When an error budget is exhausted, the team should reduce change risk and focus on restoring reliability. That usually means freezing non-critical releases, prioritizing incident fixes, improving tests or rollback, and reviewing whether the SLO or architecture is appropriate.
Technical explanation
The goal is not punishment; it is a safety mechanism that aligns product and engineering around user impact.
Actions should be predefined in an error-budget policy so decisions are not negotiated during an incident.
Once the burn rate returns to normal and corrective work is complete, normal release velocity can resume.
Hands-on example
Example policy: if budget remaining is below 10 percent, only emergency fixes ship. If budget is negative, require leadership approval for releases, complete root-cause actions, add missing alerts/runbooks, and review top reliability risks in the next weekly ops meeting.
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