Learning Chaos Engineering

Chapter 7. Collaborative Chaos

In Chapter 1 you learned that collaboration is key to successful chaos engineering. When you are running a chaos experiment, whether it be a Game Day or an automated experiment, everyone should be aware that chaos is happening (more on this in Chapter 10).

This collaboration also extends to your experiments and findings themselves. While you’ve seen how useful chaos engineering can be for you and your team as you surface, explore, and overcome weaknesses in your systems, it is potentially useful to others outside of your team as well.

The good news is that, because you put so much effort into defining hypotheses and experiments in those JSON or YAML documents with the Chaos Toolkit in earlier chapters, those experiments are almost ready to become useful candidates for cross-team sharing and even potential reuse. In this chapter you’ll learn how to make a few final tweaks so that you can share and reuse your experiments as you write your own code.

But My Experiment Is Specific, There’s No Value in Sharing It…

Even an experiment that is highly specific to a particular system can be of interest to people beyond those working on that system. Others could be inspired by everything from the type of experimental method being employed to the assumption made in your experiment’s hypothesis. You can’t predict when another person or team might be prompted to consider some potential weakness they hadn’t thought of before simply by seeing the sorts of experiments ...