Principles of Chaos Engineering

“An overhead shot of a heap of scissors, knives, hammers and other tools” by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash

From Principles of Chaos Engineering

Advances in large-scale, distributed software systems are changing the game for software engineering. As an industry, we are quick to adopt practices that increase flexibility of development and velocity of deployment. An urgent question follows on the heels of these benefits: How much confidence we can have in the complex systems that we put into production?

… An empirical, systems-based approach addresses the chaos in distributed systems at scale and builds confidence in the ability of those systems to withstand realistic conditions. We learn about the behavior of a distributed system by observing it during a controlled experiment. We call this Chaos Engineering.

Those people over at Netflix do know a thing or two about scaling. As someone who is building a complex (and sometimes complicated), distributed system, these simple yet challenging principles seem very helpful. I will be trying them out to see how they change the work we are doing at Octoblu.

Netflix has blogged about Chaos Engineering in the past, and recently updated on their progress.

Originally published at tinyletter.com.