Chaos Engineering

Part III. Human Factors

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 call this a sociotechnical system.

By the end of this part, we hope to convince you that successfully improving your resilience requires an understanding of the interplay between the human and nonhuman actors who authorize, fund, observe, build, operate, maintain, and make demands of the system. Chaos Engineering can help you better understand the sociotechnical boundary between the humans and the machines.

Nora Jones opens this part of the book with Chapter 9, “Creating Foresight.” With a focus on learning as a means of improving resilience, she explains how sometimes the most important part of Chaos Engineering happens before an experiment is even run. She also ties in the relationship between controlled experimentation and unplanned incidents: “Incidents are an opportunity for us to sit down and see how one person’s mental model of how the system worked is different than another person’s mental model of how the system worked.”

Andy Fleener explores the application of Chaos Engineering to the “socio” part of sociotechnical systems in Chapter 10, “Humanistic Chaos.” He asks, “What if we could apply the field of Chaos Engineering not only to the complex distributed technical systems we know and love, but to the complex distributed systems known ...