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Is the maintenance window burning error budget?

Example: Let's say I have a 1h error budget left. I stop the service for planned maintenance for 30 minutes. Is the error budget still 1h or is it 30 minutes?

The maintenance window is happening when there is no traffic to the application, for example, 3-5 am for online retailer that is available in one country.

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it is 30 minutes

“The development team can ‘spend’ this error budget in any way they like. If the product is currently running flawlessly, with few or no errors, they can launch whatever they want, whenever they want. Conversely, if they have met or exceeded the error budget and are operating at or below the defined SLA, all launches are frozen until they reduce the number of errors to a level that allows the launch to proceed.”

from https://www.atlassian.com/br/incident-management/devops/sre

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  • I didn't mention that in the problem description but when I'm talking about the maintenance window I'm thinking about putting the system offline when there are no users, e.g. 3-5 am for an online retailer that is available in one country. In SRE book in "Embracing Risk" it says that risk to availability is measured by unplanned downtime. The maintenance window is planned downtime. Also, SLO is an indicator for customer happiness with the service availability so when there are no users there shouldn't be any impact to SLO. landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/embracing-risk
    – danielinclouds
    Commented May 29, 2020 at 10:04
  • I got your point, but if you want to do planned downtimes you need to put it in your error budget. The sentence "The development team can ‘spend’ this error budget in any way they like" also applies to you. You are able to spend the budget error to any downtime window that you want. Remember...even your downtime is planned, your system goes offline and nobody will access it
    – Sergio Tanaka
    Commented May 29, 2020 at 12:44

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