Learning Chaos Engineering

Chapter 5. Writing and Running Your First Automated Chaos Experiment

In Chapter 4 you grabbed the Chaos Toolkit; now it’s time to actually use the toolkit to execute your first automated chaos experiment. In this chapter you’ll set up a simple target system to work your chaos against, then write and run your first automated chaos experiment to surface a weakness in that system. You’ll execute a whole cycle in which your automated chaos experiment is first used to uncover evidence of a weakness, and then used again to validate that the weakness has been overcome—see the diagram in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1. Using a chaos experiment to surface evidence of a weakness, then provide evidence of the weakness being overcome

Setting Up the Sample Target System

You need a system to explore for weaknesses, and everything you need for that is available in the learning-chaos-engineering-book-samples directory in the community-playground repo under the chaostoolkit-incubator organization. Grab the code now by cloning the repository with the git command:

(chaostk) $ git clone https://github.com/chaostoolkit-incubator/community-
            playground.git

If you’re not comfortable with using git, you can simply grab the repository’s contents as a zip file.

Getting the Example Code

In actual fact, all the experiments shown in this book are in the chaostoolkit-incubator/community-playground repo. For more ...