Learn the basics of chaos engineering in this first article in a series celebrating Kubernetes’ 11th birthday.

Kubernetes is turning 11, so I’ll be celebrating its birthday by giving you some open source tools that will help you cause chaos. Chaos engineering is part science, part planning, and part experiments. It’s the discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

Before I start passing out the gifts, in this introductory article, I will explain the basics of how chaos engineering works.

How do I get started with chaos engineering?

In my experience, the best way to start chaos engineering is by taking an incident that has happened before in production and using it as an experiment. Use your past data, make a plan to break your system in a similar way, create a repair strategy, and confirm the outcome turns out exactly how you want. If your plan fails, you have a new way to experiment and move forward toward a new way to handle issues quickly.Best of all, you can document everything as you go, which means, over time, your entire system will be fully documented so that anyone can be on call without too many escalations and everyone can have a nice break on weekends.

#kubernetes #chaos-engineering