Holidays are a team’s Chaos Monkey

One of my favourite innovations to come out of Netflix’s engineering team is Chaos Monkey. It’s a tool which is designed to deliberately wreak havoc on a company’s servers in order to detect failures before they can happen on their own.

It does this by randomly shutting down live servers and ensuring more servers are created in their place. The stakes are high.

Small teams are forced to face a similar scenario when a member of staff takes holidays or sick leave. When an area of responsibility is wholly owned by only one person, things can fall apart when they are not around.

Even in small teams like ours, we need to ensure a certain amount of redundancy to avoid a bus factor of one.