You manage your company’s primary revenue-generating application. You have an error budget policy in place that freezes production deployments when the application is close to breaching its SLO. A number of issues have recently occurred, and the application has exhausted its error budget. You need to deploy a new release to the application that includes a feature urgently required by your largest customer. You have been told that the release has passed all unit tests. What should you do?
Select an option, then click Submit answer.
Reference / correct answer:
Delay the deployment of the feature until the error budget is replenished.
Most accepted answer: A. Delay the deployment of the feature until the error budget is replenished.
Community votes: A=4, D=3
Selected Answer: A C and D are incorrect: Proceeding with the deployment immediately or trying a gradual rollout both violate the deployment freeze. Unless the release is a critical fix specifically intended to restore the system's reliability, no new feature work should be pushed into production until the system is stabilized. upvoted 1 times
Selected Answer: A A. Delay the deployment of the feature until the error budget is replenished. upvoted 1 times
Selected Answer: D The situation presents a conflict between the SRE Error Budget Policy (which requires a freeze) and a critical business need (largest customer requires the feature now). The SRE best practice is to always operate within the framework of the error budget policy, but the policy must have an escalation path and a defined procedure for deploying critical fixes or urgent business features even when the budget is exhausted. upvoted 1 times BlackCoffee 2 weeks, 6 days ago That's true but only urgent critical fixes. Here they mention critical feature and not fix. upvoted 1 times ...
That's true but only urgent critical fixes. Here they mention critical feature and not fix. upvoted 1 times
Selected Answer: A ✅ Correct answer: A. Delay the deployment of the feature until the error budget is replenished. Why?: The policy explicitly states that production deployments are frozen when the error budget is depleted. Ignoring that rule would violate your reliability governance. Even though the new feature has passed unit tests, that only proves that the code compiles and basic functionality works — it says nothing about production reliability, latency, or user impact. The correct action is to stabilize the system first, fix the underlying issues, and wait for the error budget to recover before deploying anything new. upvoted 2 times