Chaos Engineering

Chapter 21. Conclusion

Resilience is created by people. The engineers who write the functionality, those who operate and maintain the system, and even the management that allocates resources toward it are all part of a complex system. We each play a role in creating resilience, bringing to bear our experience and focused attention to this property of the system.

Tools can help. Chaos Engineering is a tool that we can use to improve the resilience of systems. As practitioners in this industry, our success depends not on removing the complexity from our systems, but on learning to live with it, navigate it, and optimize for other business-critical properties despite the underlying complexity.

When we illustrate the distinction between the tools and the people around the tools, we refer to the tools as being “below the line.” The people and the organization that put the tools in place are “above the line.” As software professionals, too often we focus on what’s happening below the line. It’s easier to see problems there, and easier to point a finger at those problems. There is a psychological satisfaction in being able to reduce an incident to a single line of code, and then just fix that one line of code. There is a temptation to stop there, but we must resist that temptation.

Throughout this book, we delved into work both below and above the line. We laid out how that work contributes to building better systems. People, organization, human interaction, tools, automation, architecture, ...