Understanding chaos engineering for reliability

Chaos engineering applies experiments to systems in production to find weaknesses and points of failure. Like fuzzy tests, a chaos experiment tries to break the infrastructure to understand how the system responds to the loss of a component. It may seem counterintuitive to introduce collapses to increase reliability. Still, if we consider it a specialized test, we want to pinpoint systemic flaws in a controlled manner instead of waiting to do that during a postmortem. It’s called chaos engineering because we want to bring uncertainties from reality as variables of an experiment. Many IT parts, such as computing, network, and storage units, can fail, whether they are physical or virtualized. We simulate real-world chaos by deleting resources or shutting down components and checking how the system behaves. Naturally, we use a chaos system to manage and coordinate those experiments that inject chaos into a system.

To understand...