I fully agree with the rest of the article -- production is the only thing that matters, it's our _sine qua non_ -- but this section is too bold by far:
> You’ll never prioritize work on non-prod like you will on prod, because customers don’t directly touch non-prod. Eventually, you’ll be scrambling to keep this popsicle sticks and duct tape environment up and running so you can test changes in it, lying to yourself, pretending it bears any resemblance to production.
Error budgets are good solution to this problem. If your change qualification process (be that a QA team, staging, pre-prod, whatever) plus your release process is very good, then you probably aren't burning through your error budget.
But if it turns out your process isn't good enough, you'll get feedback on this in the form of running out of error budget. So you can spend the rest of your quarter working on your non-production environments, so that in the future you can move fast and break an acceptable amount of things next Q.
> You’ll never prioritize work on non-prod like you will on prod, because customers don’t directly touch non-prod. Eventually, you’ll be scrambling to keep this popsicle sticks and duct tape environment up and running so you can test changes in it, lying to yourself, pretending it bears any resemblance to production.
Error budgets are good solution to this problem. If your change qualification process (be that a QA team, staging, pre-prod, whatever) plus your release process is very good, then you probably aren't burning through your error budget.
But if it turns out your process isn't good enough, you'll get feedback on this in the form of running out of error budget. So you can spend the rest of your quarter working on your non-production environments, so that in the future you can move fast and break an acceptable amount of things next Q.