Learning Chaos Engineering

Chapter 8. Creating Custom Chaos Drivers

No two systems are created the same, and there are as many failure conditions out there as there are system implementation choices. For example, you might choose any of the following options:

• Run on a virtual machine

• Run on dedicated hardware in your own data center

• Use a virtual network

• Use a hardwired network

• Use AWS, Azure, Google Cloud…(pick your own cloud infrastructure as a service provider!)

The list is almost endless, and that’s just at the infrastructure level! When you consider the many options available at other levels, such as the platform and application levels, you face a combinatorial explosion of options that would likely stymie any thoughts of a common tool for automated chaos experiments.

The key here is that none of these choices are wrong; they are just different, and your unique context will be different, too. Not everyone is running Docker containers in Kubernetes, or serverless event-driven functions—and even if they were, there’s still sufficient variation among the leading cloud providers to make adapting to each environment a challenge.

Then there are the choices that are special to your context. Even though many infrastructure, platform, and even application implementation decisions are being standardized and commoditized, it’s still likely you have something different from others in the industry. Maybe you have a legacy COBOL application, or perhaps you’ve forked and amended an open source framework ...