Failover testing

Some parts of your system may be resilient to specific points of failure, so a great place to start destructive testing is to ensure those failovers happen successfully.

Designing destructive testing requires detailed knowledge of your system’s architecture. Which elements interact with each other, and what is the failure mode for each of them? What classes of redundancy are used by the various parts of your system? Ensure you understand these workings and how your system should behave in failure cases.

Classes of redundancy

Redundant systems could include a pair of switches both capable of routing all the traffic, multiple web servers to which traffic can be sent, and database systems such as Cassandra that are capable of continuing when one node is down, among many others. Redundancy may be at the hardware or software level, although the approach and items to check are equivalent in both cases.

The important distinction for your testing is the...