Principles of Chaos Engineering

There is no mention of Netflix on the site, but the term Chaos Engineering, and the popularization of the technique, seem to come from Netflix. The Chaos Monkey README even links to this site.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Netflix&#x2F;chaosmonkey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Netflix&#x2F;chaosmonkey</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;netflix-techblog&#x2F;chaos-engineering-upgraded-878d341f15fa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;netflix-techblog&#x2F;chaos-engineering-upgrad...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;webops-perf&#x2F;free&#x2F;chaos-engineering.csp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;webops-perf&#x2F;free&#x2F;chaos-engineering.cs...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chaos_Monkey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chaos_Monkey</a>

A related Ask HN (from 2016) that I submitted: [Ask HN: Who uses Chaos Monkey in production?](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12749597" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12749597</a>). A couple of interesting responses there.

This sounds like the kind of thing that would be very powerful if built in from the start, but an absolute nightmare to try and retrofit to an existing system.<p>It reminds me of the Amazon &quot;everything must be a network service&quot; architecture. Painful to institute but with great payoffs later in terms of robustness and scalability.

Very considerate that they mentioned negative impact for users in the last point. I wonder though how well that is measured and controlled in real-world applications of this design style.

<p><pre><code> improper fallback settings when a service is unavailable; retry storms from improperly tuned timeouts; outages when a downstream dependency receives too much traffic; cascading failures when a single point of failure crashes; </code></pre> I don&#x27;t see how one couldn&#x27;t replicate those in an environment other than the production. They all involve bringing down complete services and sending some unexpected high load to other services.

So did this come about based off Chaos Theory? Then the main goal of chaos engineering would be to &quot;create order out of chaos&quot;?

I’m not affiliated with Netflix, but the negative tone of some of the comments here is hilarious. Would the critics care to share how <i>their</i> traffic&#x2F;uptime ratio compares to Netflix’s? On weekends, Netflix is responsible for about 50% of the packets on the Internet. On Earth. Netflix is down how often? But please, do share how you once replicated a MySQL database from prod to a staging environment.

Chaos Monkey and Kyle Kingsbury&#x27;s work on the Jensen tests inspired us to make this (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gundb&#x2F;panic-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gundb&#x2F;panic-server</a>), which lets us simulate all sorts of failure cases. It should be extremely useful to others if they enjoy stuff like Chaos Monkey, etc.!

It says something about the engineering maturity of the industry that destructive testing in production environments is among the <i>more</i> sophisticated practices.

I don&#x27;t like the name. It&#x27;s sounds too much like it&#x27;s the Engineering of Chaotic Systems, but there is no reference to Chaos Theory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chaos_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chaos_theory</a><p>Are they using the formal definition of chaos, or just a colloquialism?