Learning Chaos Engineering: Discovering and Overcoming System Weaknesses Through Experimentation

Most companies work hard to avoid costly failures, but in complex systems a better approach is to embrace and learn from them. Through chaos engineering, you can proactively hunt for evidence of system weaknesses before they trigger a crisis. This practical book shows software developers and system administrators how to plan and run successful chaos engineering experiments.

System weaknesses go beyond your infrastructure, platforms, and applications to include policies, practices, playbooks, and people. Author Russ Miles explains why, when, and how to test systems, processes, and team responses using simulated failures on Game Days. You'll also learn how to work toward continuous chaos through automation with features you can share across your team and organization.

• Learn to think like a chaos engineer
• Build a hypothesis backlog to determine what could go wrong in your system
• Develop your hypotheses into chaos engineering experiment Game Days
• Write, run, and learn from automated chaos experiments using the open source Chaos Toolkit
• Turn chaos experiments into tests to confirm that you've overcome the weaknesses you discovered
• Observe and control your automated chaos experiments while they are running

Russ Miles has been working as a chaos engineer at various companies (both startups and enterprises) for the past 3 years. He is part of the Chaos Collective, an expert group founded by Casey Rosenthal who runs 1-day workshops for companies looking to learn about chaos engineering and beginning to establish their own in-house chaos engineering capability. Russ has been teaching technical topics, as well as offering consultancy, worldwide for the past 15 years. His current courses include a popular public 3-day course on chaos engineering that has most recently been run in London. He also speaks internationally. He has founded and continued to build a community around the free and open source Chaos Toolkit and Hub projects.