Chaos Engineering. Building Confidence in System Behavior through Experiments

by Casey Rosenthal, Lorin Hochstein, Aaron Blohowiak

With so many interacting components, the number of things that can go wrong in a distributed system is enormous. You’ll never be able to prevent all possible failure modes, but you can identify many of the weaknesses in your system before they’re triggered by these events. This report introduces you to Chaos Engineering, a method of experimenting on infrastructure that lets you expose weaknesses before they become a real problem.

Members of the Netflix team that developed Chaos Engineering explain how to apply these principles to your own system. By introducing controlled experiments, you’ll learn how emergent behavior from component interactions can cause your system to drift into an unsafe, chaotic state.
- Hypothesize about steady state by collecting data on the health of the system
- Vary real-world events by turning off a server to simulate regional failures
- Run your experiments as close to the production environment as possible
- Ramp up your experiment by automating it to run continuously
- Minimize the effects of your experiments to keep from blowing everything up
- Learn the process for designing chaos engineering experiments
- Use the Chaos Maturity Model to map the state of your chaos program, including realistic goals

Genres: Programming, Technology, Software, Engineering, Technical, Computer Science, Architecture

72 pages, ebook

Published May 23, 2017

Reviews

[Leandro López · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written book. It isn't technical at all, but presents the ideas behind Chaos Engineering in a way that both engineers and management can understand.

[Martin Chalupa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides an introduction to Chaos Engineering. I would say the best audience is people who know just very little or nothing about this topic. The book is short and covers basics. It is great to extend your knowledge and provides a great starting point for your learning and exploration of this area. The book itself mentions further resources such as other books, online articles or real projects implementing mentioned ideas. I really loved how easily and understandable was everything explained. I can really recommend this book.

[Simon Eskildsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it. Sums up all the content I've been able to find from Netflix on this topic in the past, and adds more. It answered a couple of questions I've had for a while about the practise as a whole. This is complementary to a book like Release It, with more focus on defining the discipline, rather than go into the nitty-gritty of the engineering.

[Jaroslav Urban · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, this is a disturbing idea that is applicable from certain level of company size, at least at the level it is described in book.
Could be interesting to know how much people is actually managing all this DevOps stuff.

[Mike Dixson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as in depth as I would have likely but covering the concepts well and providing food for thought into implementing your of chaos testing infrastructure, including whether you're actually ready to do it!!!
A fairly quick read so definitely worth adding to each engineers arsenal.

[Gábor Hajba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not bad, it gives a good introduction on what's behind the scenes in Netflix' Chaos Team and the tools you have already heard about (Chaos Monkey for example).

[Philipp Fehre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good, and short introduction with many resources to follow up.

[Raja Baradwaj · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a non engineer I went into the book a little apprehensive. I’m happy that my fear was unfounded, it’s a book even a marketer would find it easy & interesting to read. Time well invested !!

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely mind-blowing idea from Netflix to embrace chaos and learn from it.

[Andrew Gapic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent primer on chaos testing

[Ugur Halatoglu · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is too superficial, even to help understand the chaos idea.

[Christian Nicolov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent explanation of how to make distributed systems more resilient to failure