Chaos Engineering

Definition

Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. It involves proactively and deliberately injecting failure into a system to test its resilience.

Why It Matters

In complex, distributed systems, failures are inevitable. Chaos Engineering helps teams find weaknesses and blind spots in their system before they cause real outages. It is a proactive approach to improving reliability.

Contextual Example

Netflix's Chaos Monkey is a famous example. It is a tool that runs in their production environment and randomly terminates virtual server instances. This forces engineers to build services that are resilient to instance failure from day one.

Common Misunderstandings

• Chaos Engineering is not about randomly breaking things. It is about running thoughtful, planned experiments with a clear hypothesis.
• These experiments are ideally run in the production environment to test the system under real-world conditions.