Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the importance of destructive testing and the main areas it covers. Deliberately degrading your system by stopping services or servers, blocking communications, triggering failovers, and restoring from backups are all vital areas to cover to ensure your system will perform well in live environments. None of these areas test features that customers use. They generally have far less development time devoted to them than features that provide users with more functionality or improve customer experience. However, without checking this behavior, how the entire system runs is at risk.

With areas of the system designed to be redundant, you need to ensure those failovers occur correctly. The monitoring process should report the error, but the overall functionality should not be changed. There may be a period of transition while the system detects the issue and reroutes traffic or processing, so you need to measure that time and ensure that full...