Chaos Engineering: where are we?
Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production — http://principlesofchaos.org/.
Initiated by Netflix, this discipline follows the track of Chaos Monkey and their Simian Army and grows up to a new level.
However, even if the concept is more and more present in our conferences, it is not as well spread as Chaos Monkey :
Not yet.
There are however a lot of signs that it will explode in the next months.
The concept enters the Technology Radar of ThoughtWorks:
Communities are rising around the world every day:
- Paris Chaos Engineering Community
- London Chaos Engineering Community
- Chaos Engineering Hamburg
- New York Chaos Engineering Community
- Chicago Chaos Engineering Community
- Twin Cities Chaos Engineering Community
- Vancouver Chaos Engineering Community
- Seattle Chaos Engineering Community
- Salt Lake City Chaos Engineering Community
- Silicon Valley Chaos Engineering Community
- Korea Chaos Engineering Community
- Shanghai Chaos Engineering Community
- Melbourne Chaos Engineering Community
The discipline is spreading around companies, more and more people are contributing:
Experiments in production — Chaos Monkey-like experiments — exists in cloud and hosting companies (Azure, Digital Ocean, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Twillio, …) as well as end-user ones (Netflix, LinkedIn, Uber, OUI.sncf, …).
More and more Gameday are done during conferences as well as in companies, Amazon of course, but also Veolia Water Technologies or DiUS who provide a really useful set of resources to organize your Gameday. OUI.sncf decline the concept by creating Days-of-chaos, a gameday where failures are injected by Ops Team in real working test environment of the Feature Teams who joined the game, working on their applications, not only Unicorns.Rentals on Amazon AWS.
Disaster Recovery testing is no more the exercise you do once and forget it, but become more and more professional like DiRT at Google, Storm at Facebook, DRT at Dropbox or even in bank sector like at Fidelity Investments.
Who will be next?
Maybe you!
And maybe you will use some enablers like the ChaosToolkit provide by ChaosIQ or the platform from Gremlins Inc.
Start by reading the awesome free ebook at O’Reilly: Chaos Engineering, Building Confidence in System Behavior through Experiments
And don’t forget “Introducing Chaos is not the best way to meet your new colleagues, though it is the fastest.” Nora Jones (@nora_js)
Hope to see you soon in the wonderful world of Chaos!
