Overview
Pioneered by Netflix with 'Chaos Monkey,' chaos engineering involves intentionally introducing failures—such as killing a server or injecting network latency—to see how the system reacts and to identify weaknesses before they cause real outages.
Principles
- Build a Hypothesis: Predict how the system should behave under stress.
- Vary Real-world Events: Introduce failures like server crashes or network spikes.
- Run Experiments in Production: To get the most realistic results.
- Automate Experiments: To run them continuously.
- Minimize Blast Radius: Ensure that experiments don't cause major disruptions for users.
Goal
To build resilient systems that can survive the unpredictable nature of large-scale distributed environments.