The previous chapter described complex systems in much the same way one would describe the water to someone who is drowning. This chapter focuses on how to stop drowning and surf the waves instead. To learn how to navigate complex systems, we present two methods:
Dynamic Safety Model
Economic Pillars of Complexity Model
Both of these models are foundational to the construction of Chaos Engineering as a discipline within software engineering.
Dynamic Safety Model
This model is an adaptation of Jens Rasmussen’s Dynamic Safety Model,1 which is well known and highly regarded within the field of Resilience Engineering. The adaptation presented here simply reframes the model in a context relevant to software engineers.
The Dynamic Safety Model has three properties: Economics, Workload, and Safety (Figure 2-1). You can imagine an engineer in the middle of these three properties, attached to each by a rubber band. Throughout their workday, the engineer can move about, stretching the rubber band; however, if the engineer strays too far from a property, then the rubber band snaps and it is game over for that engineer.
Figure 2-1. The Dynamic Safety Model
The fascinating thing about this model is that engineers implicitly optimize their work in order to prevent any of the rubber bands from snapping. We will touch on each of the three properties ...
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