Building Resilient and Fault-Tolerant Systems with Chaos Engineering

Bringing Down the House: How Controlled Failures Can Improve Your System's Resilience

AuthorAuthor

Justin Trugman & Kevin Urrutia
March 13, 2023

Welcome to the 75 new Bug Driven Developers this week! If you enjoy this post, forward it to your developer friends so they can join us.

Here’s what we got for you today:

  • Chaos engineering, the art of breaking things on purpose to make them stronger

  • Resources to dive deeper into chaos engineering

  • Twitter API Plan Costs $2.5M/Year

  • GPT-4 in March

  • How does a bank collapse in 48 hours?

👹 Let's start off this week by talking about Chaos Engineering

Let's face it, in the world of software development, things break. And they break all the time. But what if instead of fearing those failures, we embrace them? That's where chaos engineering comes in. By proactively introducing controlled failures into your systems, you can identify weaknesses and fix them before they become a problem for your users.

Now, we get it, let's address the elephant in the room - yes, we know chaos engineering sounds a bit scary. But trust us, it's not as intimidating as it sounds. In fact, it can be quite fun! Here are some of the things you can do with chaos engineering:

  1. Simulate a sudden increase in traffic to your application to see how it handles the load.

  2. Introduce latency to your service calls to see how your application behaves under slow network conditions.

  3. Inject errors into your database to see how your application handles the exceptions.

  4. Randomly kill instances in your auto-scaling group to test the resiliency of your infrastructure.

  5. Corrupt data in your message queues to see how your application reacts to unexpected data.

But as with any experimental practice, there are certain best practices to keep in mind to ensure you get the most out of your Chaos Engineering efforts. Here are some key guidelines to follow when incorporating Chaos Engineering into your system testing process:

  1. Start small: Begin with small experiments to identify weaknesses in your system. This will help you learn how to manage risk and build confidence in your approach.

  2. Plan your experiments: Identify your goals and objectives and design your experiments accordingly. Make sure to document your plans and communicate them to your team.

  3. Involve your team: Chaos engineering is a team sport. Involve everyone from developers to operators to ensure a comprehensive approach.

  4. Use real-world scenarios: Replicating real-world scenarios is critical to ensuring the effectiveness of your chaos engineering experiments. Use historical data or industry benchmarks to inform your experiments.

  5. Automate where possible: Automate as much of your chaos engineering process as possible, including testing, monitoring, and response. This will help you to scale and repeat experiments with minimal effort.

  6. Monitor and measure: Keep track of your experiments and measure the results. This will help you to identify trends and ensure that your system is improving over time.

  7. Continuously improve: Chaos engineering is not a one-time exercise. Regularly review and adjust your experiments to ensure that they remain relevant and effective.

📖 Learn more here

Here are some guides we like that can be helpful to dive deeper into Chaos Engineering

🔗Links in Tech

Some additional reads we liked this week

😂 Meme of the Week

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s newsletter! If you have any questions, feel free to let us know on Twitter (Justin's Twitter) (Kevin's Twitter)

Thanks,

Justin + Kevin

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