Release It!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17Chaos Engineering

Imagine a conversation that starts like this:

“Hey boss, I’m going to log into production and kill some boxes. Just a few here and there. Shouldn’t hurt anything,” you say.

How do you think the rest of that conversation will go? It might end up with a visit from Human Resources and an order to clean out your desk. Maybe even a visit to the local psychiatric facility! Killing instances turns out to be a radical idea—but not a crazy one. It’s one technique in an emerging discipline called “chaos engineering.”