Understanding Every Aspect of Chaos Engineering

Quick Go-Through: Chaos engineering is a complete process of testing a complex and distributed system to ensure it can endure abrupt disturbances and outages and produce a resilient software system. Chaos engineers implement the whole procedure. Chaos engineering utilizes different experiments to pinpoint the most vulnerable points that can cause system breakdown and disturbances. It helps chaos engineers to prevent and minimize breakdown issues actively. In this blog, you will learn about various aspects of chaos engineering. So, enjoy this ultimate guide on chaos engineering.

There are times when businesses get lost in the jigsaw puzzle of technology.

You must have encountered news flashes like ‘online transaction apps down,’ or ‘services unavailable,’ and many more instances of unpredictability.

Therefore, these outages take place majorly in complicated and distributed systems as various components collapse at the same time. And it is a hard-to-believe fact that the extent of system failures or outages costs over $100,000. Unbelievable, right?

So, is there any solution to these hazardous problems? Well, a big YES!

Well, how Netflix dealt with all these issues has helped us with an ideal approach and produced a hot and sizzling process, i.e., chaos engineering.

Curious? What exactly is chaos engineering?

Firstly, it’s nothing about creating chaos. Chaos engineering involves different experiments to recognize the most vulnerable points that can cause system breakdown and mishaps. It helps engineers actively prevent and minimize disruptions and outages and has become an essential aspect of the modern software engineering process.

This blog will help you explore the fundamental aspects of chaos engineering, along with its use cases and principles.

So, is there any solution to these hazardous problems? Well, a big YES!

As we all know, utilizing cloud-based and microservice architecture offers many advantages but also brings chaos and challenges, which can lead to severe breakdowns. And obviously, a software engineer must make a system as reliable and seamless as possible. Therefore, how Netflix dealt with all these issues has helped us with an ideal approach and produced a hot and sizzling process, i.e., chaos engineering.

Curious enough? What exactly is chaos engineering?

But don’t worry; it’s nothing about creating chaos. Chaos engineering involves different experiments to recognize the most vulnerable points that can cause system breakdown and mishaps. It helps chaos engineers actively prevent and minimize disruptions and outages and has become an essential aspect of modern software engineering.

And this blog will help you in learning chaos engineering more deeply.

So, without wasting time, let’s dive deeper into the basics and define chaos engineering.

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What is Chaos Engineering?

Wondering what is chaos engineering? Allow us to define chaos engineering.

Now, chaos engineering is a process of testing a complex and distributed system to ensure it can endure abrupt disturbances and outages. And yes, you need special force for this purpose; these saviors are called chaos engineers.

Chaos engineering follows chaos theory, which concentrates on uncertain and random behavior. So, the ultimate objective of chaos engineering is to find out the loopholes in a software system with the help of different experiments that rapidly identify any abnormal behavior.

The most significant benefit of chaos engineering is that businesses utilize it to pinpoint vulnerabilities before the system breakdown or before a hacker knows. And we are not lying; that can be dangerous! When you do modifications as an outcome of chaos engineering testing, it helps in better confidence for business systems.

Here’s some fascinating information for you – many IT organizations also arrange gaming days where teams from distinct parts of the world try to breach software systems. They use different chaos engineering practices and tactics to identify potential loopholes in their company’s software system.

Why Do You Need Chaos Engineering?

The clutter of development is quite genuine, specifically in the case of complex distributed systems, embedded systems, and microservice architecture deployments. From an application point of view, software developers need to test each microservice individually and function as designed. Regular maintenance and monitoring strategies can quickly assess whether an individual service is sound.

Several questions must pop into your mind - how in the world do these systems become chaotic? And why do we need chaos engineering software? We have your answer. While utilizing different microservice patterns, a single request can travel throughout diverse services for a combined response. It does this to accomplish the requests by other services or users. Every remote request must travel between different services and additional infrastructure and traverse various application edges, all open to vulnerabilities and failures.

But the question is, if a minor or insignificant infrastructure service or element isn’t responding within the service level agreement (SLA), how can it impact the software system’s competence, user experience, and user journey? Now, this is where chaos engineering and chaos engineers come into the picture. Recognizing and making your system vulnerability-proof defines the true chaos engineering meaning. Therefore, with the help of chaos engineering experiments, you can make a chaotic system more resilient and less vulnerable.

We bet now you’d understand the basic definition of what is chaos engineering and why chaos engineering testing is essential for sustainable software engineering.

Let’s now move to another important aspect of chaos engineering, i.e., it’s working.

How Chaos Engineering Works?

The initiation of chaos engineering occurs with a good knowledge of software’s predictable behavior. And yes, it’s crucial!

So, come on, let’s now discuss the working of chaos engineering software.

Step.1: Hypothesis

Here, chaos engineers must ask themselves what can happen if they alter a variable. All this is done based on some assumptions. If they discontinue any services randomly, they presume there will be no interruption when the service continues. The hypothesis is a combination of some questions and assumptions.

Step.2: Testing

Now, to begin with, chaos engineering testing, chaos engineers organize load testing and simulated uncertainty combined and look out for signals or indications of any turmoil in the devices, networks, infrastructure, and services that deliver the solutions or applications. Also, take note any breakdowns in the stack can breach the hypothesis.

Step.3: Blast Radius

Chaos engineers then understand what and what not takes place under unstable cloud conditions. How? By separating and studying the failures. Therefore, the blast radius is a term for any impact or damage the test causes to your system. However, there is nothing to worry about, as chaos engineers can handle the blast radius situations by managing the tests. nothing to worry about, as chaos engineers can handle the blast radius situations by managing the tests.

Step.4: Insights

All these revelations form proper intakes into the whole software development and delivery operations, so microservices and new innovative software solutions can better withstand such unpredictable events.

Here’s the deal, chaos engineers at Radixweb are experts in this domain and are well-versed with chaos engineering experiments and their working cycle. And believe us when we say this, they’ll help you re-engineer your legacy systems using the best possible ways, strategies, and futuristic tools.

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Who Uses Chaos Engineering?

In general, chaos engineering originates from small teams within the DevOps service environment. It often includes applications operating in both pre-development and development environments. Because it can touch many systems, Chaos engineering practices provide extensive implications (not in the wrong way, of course!) as it contacts many software systems. It also influences stakeholders and different teams within an organization.

It requires input and contribution of different individuals with different skill sets and domain expertise to work on interruptions like spanning networks, cloud infrastructure, and hardware. Individuals including risk experts, infrastructure and network architects, procurement officers, and expert security teams. That’s a good thing, as it provides a better test scope, which makes chaos engineering more valuable and fruitful. And professionals at Radixweb swear by this approach.

Although a small team owns and handles chaos engineering, it’s a unique practice that often needs input from some, yet the whole village can experience and enjoy its benefits.

A Great Deal: Just like chaos engineering, there’s another approach in the world of DevOps to prevent system outages: site reliability engineering (SRE). They help businesses to ensure that their systems are redundant, fault-tolerant, and provide seamless customer experience. So, to learn more about SRE, you can visit our blog – what is site reliability engineering?

Okay, okay, you can thank us later!

Now, let’s move to another important aspect and discuss chaos engineering principles.

Principles of Chaos Engineering

The chaos engineering principles is a remarkable manifesto that tells us about the main objectives and principles of chaos engineering. The chaos engineering principles further fall into four habits resembling the. However, contrary to the scientific method, the main assumption is that the software system is steady and then checks for variations. And this proves, the more challenging it is to interfere with the stable state, the more robust and reliable the system.

Let’s now go through the four chaos engineering principles.

1. Determine the Baseline – When determining any deviation, it’s essential first to understand the steady state. You need a sound metric system, depending on what you are testing. Chaos developers at Radixweb opt for metrics including high-standard objectives or response time, such as suitable prevalence measures and higher abilities to accomplish user journeys in a specific time.

2. Hypothesize the Endurance of Steady-State – You know, opposing the speck of the scientific method and supposing a hypothesis is genuine all the time does not provide much scope. Therefore, the organization follows a chaos engineering approach to test it against steady and robust systems. It helps them to find loopholes such as infrastructure failures or application failures. Wanna know a secret? See, running chaos engineering experiments against unsteady and vulnerable systems is of no value because those systems are already unreliable (and it’s known!)

3. Present Different Experiments/Variables – Like any other science experiment, chaos engineering testing presents different variables to the investigation to check the system’s response. These chaos engineering experiments depict breakdown scenarios affecting one or the other four application piers – networking, computing, application infrastructure, and storage. For instance, a failure could include network interruption or hardware failure. application infrastructure, and storage.

4. Try to Invalidate the Hypothesis – Now, if the hypothesis is for a stable state, any interference or disruption from the steady state can invalidate the stability hypothesis. By now, you’ll have an area to concentrate on; chaos engineers can modify or design alterations to make a more stable and robust system.

Employing these chaos engineering principles leads to best practices and teeny-tiny design considerations when opting for chaos engineering experiments.

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How is Chaos Engineering Different from Testing?

Chaos engineering and chaos testing are different from each other in a few ways.

Firstly, chaos engineering concentrates on discovering vulnerable failure locations before they cause serious issues. Chaos testing, on the other hand, helps verify the system’s working as expected. In simple terms, chaos engineering is proactive, while chaos testing is reactive.

Thereby, chaos engineers focus on preventing disruptions and outages with the help of introducing and rectifying controlled failures before they could cause further issues in a live ecosystem. With the help of these controlled failures, chaos engineers discover which system components are more robust and which are vulnerable. Chaos testing can only determine the system functionality after it’s completed.

Companies Utilizing Chaos Engineering

These fistfuls of companies, including Netflix (the most valid one), Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Stitch Fix, etc., are some of the best chaos engineering examples. They are embracing the chaos engineering approach to avoid disturbances and outages proactively.

Chaos engineering has become a knight in shining armor for companies who had to let go of millions of dollars because of outages or other software issues. Here’s the most famous and significant software glitch in history: a US-based firm known as the Knight Capital Trading Group lost over USD 400 million in just 30 minutes. And how? All due to a software glitch.

Sad, isn’t it? It’s like waking up to the biggest nightmare!

Also, Netflix is one of the most notable and inspiring chaos engineering examples. Netflix motivated its software developers and engineers to think of and create a recovery model which strengthens the platform. Netflix employed chaos monkey testing.

Umm, chaos monkey testing? Never heard of it! Let’s do it today.

Chaos monkey testing was designed to halt their servers during working hours. It helped them to keep their software developers on the ball to solve these problems ASAP. As an outcome of Netflix chaos engineering, chaos monkey testing, and developers’ efforts, Netflix prevented significant disruptions and outages and enhanced its reputation as a prominent streaming conglomerate.

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Benefits of Chaos Engineering

Let’s now go through some of the best benefits of chaos engineering.

• Better Collaboration - Chaos engineering promotes better collaboration. The insights chaos engineers gather are not limited to them as they can share them with different departments within an organization.

• Encourages Innovation - Chaos engineering encourages higher creativity and innovation by recognizing structural and designs loopholes in the software system. The information chaos engineers gather from extensively understanding the design and structural flaws helps them enhance the system’s components.

• Boosts Business Productivity - Organizations employing chaos engineering software can create robust and reliable systems that boost client experience and satisfaction. Moreover, these stronger software applications boost your business demand by developing minimal failure-vulnerable software.

• Follows Observability – Engineers follow chaos engineering observability which is crucial today. Chaos engineering observability is the process of understanding the system's internal components by assessing external turnouts.

• Simplifies Incident Response – Incident response is essential for apps that run every time. Chaos engineering helps simplify the process of incident response, repairs, and troubleshooting by testing the components and variables well in advance.

Nothing is perfect in the world. Therefore, with benefits comes challenges also. And it’s fair to discuss both.

Challenges of Chaos Engineering

Although the advantages of chaos engineering are crystal clear, you should still follow this approach with greater consideration. So, we’ve enlisted the top challenges you’ll face with chaos engineering.

• Fuzzy State of System Start – Here, you do not have a clear picture of the system’s starting state before running for tests. Without any clarity, chaos engineers can face difficulties while understanding the actual impact of tests. This lowers the efficiency of chaos engineering testing and can put distributed and embedded software systems at higher risks, which makes it challenging to manage blast radius.

• Unnecessary Harm – This is the major challenge with chaos engineering testing is its vulnerability to unnecessary harm. Chaos engineering leads to real-life loss that surpasses the allotments of justifiable testing. So, to limit the expense of exposing application vulnerabilities, companies should prevent running tests that invade the blast radius.

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You know, for implementing chaos engineering seamlessly, with or without choice, you’ll need some best chaos engineering tools. And chaos engineers at Radixweb utilize multiple tools for seamless chaos engineering. Hence, chaos engineering tools deserve a different section in this blog, which also makes your work easy.

Wondering why? Let’s have a look at the following section.

Some Popular Chaos Engineering Tools

Netflix teams have developed a suite of awesome chaos engineering tools that support all the tests and experiments very well. These tools helped Netflix with efficient AWS chaos engineering. We’ve enlisted some of the best chaos engineering tools to make your work a little easier.

Let’s go through them one by one.

1. Chaos Monkey Testing Tool - Chaos monkey testing helps you identify and detect various bottlenecks of the software system and provides you with solutions to solve these problems. Additionally, chaos monkey testing is an open-source tool that helps you halt some operations and gives in-depth insights into failures.

Belonging from a technical background, we also got confused hearing the term chaos monkey testing, and we’re quite sure you also must be wondering about monkey in chaos monkey testing. So, to clear your doubts on this, you can read a book named ‘Chaos Monkeys’ written by Antonio Garcia Martinez. It will help you.

2. Chaos Mesh Testing Tool – Chaos mesh provides a dedicated dashboard integrated with various in-built chaos engineering experiments. It also helps us with time limits to infuse chaos into our systems. Moreover, with the help of the chaos mesh tool, you can customize experiments and carry out status audits of different elements and development stages.

3. Litmus Chaos Engineering Tool – With the help of litmus chaos engineering you can perform controlled chaos tests in the development stage. It also enables you to generate reports, run test suites, log capturing, and detect bugs.

4. Gremlin Chaos Engineering Tool – Gremlin chaos engineering provides you with three different attack modes and several breakdown situations to help create reliable and resilient software systems. Gremlin chaos engineering also offers specific features and functionalities like CLI support, latency injections, disk fill-ups, and memory leak testing.

These were the best-in-class chaos engineering tools anybody could ask for.

(Although, we personally prefer chaos monkey testing and gremlin chaos engineering tools.)

Now, what’s the use of all the knowledge when you don’t know how to implement it? So, this is the reason we’ve shortlisted the best chaos engineering practices which will help you with seamless chaos engineering implementation.

Chaos Engineering Best Practices

While many organizations, specifically a few regulated industrial sectors, have deployed disaster recovery testing over time, however, there are times when companies neglect these tests as their developers and engineers are in limited and majorly focuses on daily tasks and operations. However, there are times when companies neglect these tests as their developers and engineers are limited and majorly focuses on daily tasks and operations.

Performing chaos engineering testing needs proper engineering resources and a good budget for cloud resources and hardware. This is why we’ve found streamlining testing to a five-step procedure that can help chaos engineers to infuse chaos tests into their solutions or to experience hassle-free chaos engineering you can also opt for prominent product engineering partner, like Radixweb. As chaos engineers at Radixweb understand and follows these chaos engineering practices thoroughly. So, let’s have a look at them.

1. Ensure your current software system is steady and determine the uptime state. You need to take care of the control and monitoring to deal with frequent failures.
2. Once you’re sure of the steady state of your system, now ensure there is consistent system’s stability. It means you must assume that the steadiness state of your system will remain constant as you start the chaos engineering experiments for your system.
3. Determine the testing location. In the starting stages of testing, you need to choose to create an isolated testing ecosystem, this helps to reduce higher vulnerabilities to the development environment. And as the process goes on, infusing chaos will get less risky and provide a better testing flow for your overall environment.
4. Now, this is the perfect time to introduce chaos into your systems. The process is a bit sensitive as well as a bit risky, so as said in the above point, you may require introducing testing in the isolated environment. Then, you need to infuse complete failure tests. Doing this in production benefits the overall process of monitoring tests and providing system alerts. Thereby, helping you to understand the reaction of your product environment on different failure scenarios.
5. Rehearse with us – monitor and repeat! You’ll learn most of the things in the first few tries at chaos engineering testing. Still, continuous testing helps contribute to a more resilient system architecture.

Control the Chaos with Radixweb!Congratulations! We’ve reached the end of our blog and thank you for being with us till the end. In this blog we’ve discussed several distinct aspects of chaos engineering, firstly we started with what is chaos engineering? (The father of all questions, of course!), then we learn about the working, we also saw difference between chaos engineering and chaos testing.Furthermore, we talked about importance of chaos engineering, who uses it, chaos engineering principles, examples, its benefits, challenges, different chaos engineering tools, and lastly, we discussed best chaos engineering practices for reliable and resilient software system.Is implementing chaos engineering easy? Sorry to burst this bubble, but it’s not. Chaos engineering is not everyone’s cup of tea. It requires specific individuals known as chaos engineers to go through the complete process.What to do and where to find chaos engineers? Chill! Don’t fear when we’re here.Chaos engineering services from Radixweb, a reputable software development company, helps you with the best chaos engineering experiments to make your software system more resilient and robust. Our chaos engineers help to manage and monitor blast radius and provide you with in-depth insights to isolate the key cause of breakdowns. We’ll help you create a top-notch software system free of vulnerabilities.Contact us right away to know more about chaos engineering.