Chaos Engineering

Chapter 9. Creating Foresight

In order to determine and envision how to achieve reliability and resilience that our customers and businesses are happy with, organizations must be able to look back unobscured by hindsight bias. Resilient organizations don’t take past successes as a reason for confidence. Instead, they use them as an opportunity to dig deeper, find underlying risks, and refine mental models of how our systems succeed and fail.

There are key components of Chaos Engineering beyond building platforms for testing reliability and running Game Days. Understanding the concerns, ideas, and mental models of how the system is structured for each individual and learning where your organization excels in technical and human resilience are things that can’t be automated away by code. This chapter will address the three different phases of Chaos Engineering and the hidden goals within each phase that might be the greatest benefit of all: using Chaos Engineering as a way to distill expertise.

The chronically underinvested stages of Chaos Engineering in our industry are the Before and After phases—and these tend to fall on a single individual to complete, usually the facilitator. This is someone who can act as a third party during the experiment, but prior to that will educate themselves on what the team is going through, their systems, and how it all works. If we only optimize for finding issues before they become incidents, we miss out on getting the most out of the main Chaos ...