A checkout service has used nearly all of its quarterly error budget, but a large marketing-driven feature is scheduled to ship next week. Under a typical error budget policy, what should the team do?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: B
An error budget policy is agreed in advance and tells teams what to do when the budget is exhausted or nearly so. The usual response is to halt risky releases and shift engineering time to reliability fixes until the service is back within its objective. This keeps feature velocity and reliability in balance. Adjusting the target or cutting testing defeats the purpose of having the budget.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Customer commitments matter, but the policy exists to make that tradeoff explicit. Ignoring it removes the protection the budget was meant to give.
- C. Changing the SLO after the fact to make the numbers look better moves the goalposts. It hides the reliability problem rather than fixing it.
- D. Skipping staging tests raises the chance of a bad release while the budget is already low. It is the opposite of what the policy asks for.