Chaos Engineering

Part I. Setting the Stage

Throughout history, competitive advantages have presented themselves as complex systems. Military science, construction, maritime innovations—to the humans who had to interact with those systems at the time, there were so many moving parts interacting in unforeseeable ways that it was impossible to predict the result with confidence. Software systems are today’s complex systems.

Chaos Engineering was deliberately created as a proactive discipline to understand and navigate complex systems. Part I of this book introduces examples of complex systems and grounds the principles of Chaos Engineering within that context. The content of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 is laid out in the natural order that experienced engineers and architects learn to manage complexity: contemplate, encounter, confront, embrace, and finally navigate it.

Chapter 1 explores the properties of complex systems, illustrating those properties with three examples taken from software systems: “In complex systems, we acknowledge that one person can’t hold all of the pieces in their head.” In Chapter 2 we turn our attention to navigating complexity as a systemic approach: “The holistic, systemic perspective of Chaos Engineering is one of the things that sets it apart from other practices.” Two models, the Dynamic Safety Model and the Economic Pillars of Complexity Model, are presented as ways to think about working with the complexity.

Chapter 3 builds on that exploration of complex systems presented ...