Chaos Engineering

6 Who you gonna call? Syscall-busters!

This chapter covers

• Observing syscalls of a running process by using strace and BPF
• Working with black-box software
• Designing chaos experiments at the syscall level
• Blocking syscalls by using strace and seccomp

It’s time to take a deep dive—all the way to the OS—to learn how to do chaos engineering at the syscall level. I want to show you that even in a simple system, like a single process running on a host, you can create plenty of value by applying chaos engineering and learning just how resilient that system is to failure. And, oh, it’s good fun too!

This chapter starts with a brief refresher on syscalls. You’ll then see how to do the following:

• Understand what a process does without looking at its ...