Chaos Toolkit 1.0.0 and a lot of joy

A solid foundation for a great future

Late 2017, Russ Miles and I released the first version of the Chaos Toolkit CLI. A tool to help us, and hopefully others, to perform Chaos Engineering in a repeatable and methodical way. Today, it is not just the two of us any longer but lots of users around the world and many active contributors. Releasing a 1.0.0 of the Chaos Toolkit is a testimony to the joy and effort that has been put into this project by its entire community. Thank you everyone!

Version 1.0.0 is an important milestone. It sends the signal you can rely on it for the future. If I look at the core of the Chaos Toolkit and its specification, I think we offered stability since the beginning. The concepts and implementation have been consistent and, we hope, have allowed the community to grow confident about becoming good Chaos Engineers.

This release could not have happened without the community enjoying the tool and growing with us. We are often surprised to learn what some of the Chaos Toolkit’s users are doing with it. They are going far with it because, we believe, they are confident the tool will behave as they expect with very little surprises. Stability is never boring, stability unlocks your users!

One bet we made initially was to go for an architecture of plugins so the community would feel more at ease to contribute while the core remained stable. It turned out to work great. While your users may want to contribute, doing so on the core of the tool is always a little unnerving as you are aware you may break more than just your own world. Today, the Chaos Toolkit has twelve extensions which are mostly driven by their contributors. It is exciting for us to see users contribute so easily and express their needs. A good example is the AWS driver extension which has been contributed to by several users. All of these contributions respecting what already exists.

The Chaos Toolkit is a tool we have loved getting off the ground but our proudest moment is the building of a community that enjoys developing their own expertise through it.

What’s the future looking like?

While stability is important, it does not mean you cannot innovate. In fact, we argue this is the premise of Chaos Engineering, because you are reliable you can innovate more confidently.

So, what’s in store? Well, we have ideas we want to explore with the community:

• Looking at making the governance of extensions clearer. Ideally, we want to turn contributors into maintainers of their extensions. We will reach out to other projects to figure out the right way of doing this. Regarding governance of the core, we also need to explore options.
• Updating the documentation. While our current documentation provides the basics, we can do more.
• Heavily working on the Chaos Platform as the next phase in users’ journey into enabling their Chaos Engineering capability. Where the Chaos Toolkit is one engineer developing a skill in isolation, the Chaos Platform is all about collaboration and visibility at the team level.
• Federating the industry on the Open Chaos Initiative as the place of discussion for a definition of the Chaos Engineering concepts while the Chaos Toolkit will become one implementation.

Getting Involved in the Chaos Toolkit

The Chaos Toolkit is a community-led open source and free project whose goal is to enable everyone to create and use their own automated chaos engineering experiments. Vendor-neutral and free, now and always, it’s a great place learn about chaos engineering, to use as the foundation for your own experiments, and even to bring your own chaos engineering experiment requirements and ideas.

You can get involved today by raising issues and feature requests, grabbing the code, or even just joining us on our community slack.

ChaosIQ is a company that provides commercial and enterprise support for the Chaos Toolkit.