When should teams adopt Error budgets, and when should they avoid it?

Error budgets are a key concept in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) that help teams manage their service reliability and development velocity. However, there are specific scenarios when teams should consider adopting error budgets and when they should avoid them.

When to Adopt Error Budgets:

• High Availability Requirements: Teams managing critical services that require high uptime should adopt error budgets to balance reliability and feature development.
• Frequent Deployments: If the team practices continuous delivery, error budgets can help manage risk and ensure that service reliability is not compromised.
• Clear SLAs: When there are explicit Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place with customers, adopting error budgets becomes essential to meet expectations.

When to Avoid Error Budgets:

• Low Complexity Services: For simpler services with minimal dependencies, implementing error budgets may introduce unnecessary overhead.
• Short-Lived Projects: Teams working on short-term projects or prototypes may not benefit from the structure error budgets provide.
• All or Nothing Metrics: If the team's KPIs are too narrow in scope and reliability is the only focus, error budgets could detract from important user experience aspects.