Chaos Engineering.

Basiri, A., Behnam, N., de Rooij, R., Hochstein, L., Kosewski, L., Reynolds, J., & Rosenthal, C. (2016). Chaos Engineering. IEEE Software, 33(3), 35-41.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2016

DOI

10.1109/ms.2016.60

Link

https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2016.60

Cited from

computer_science, economics_finance, mathematics, military_strategic_studies, psychology, rhetoric, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

11 citations across 11 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Antifragility
  • Engineering and software: Chaos engineering deliberately injects failures into production systems so that recovery machinery is exercised and hardened, an empirical discipline Basiri and colleagues (2016) describe in their account of Netflix's controlled failure-injection practice; systems that are continuously perturbed develop deeper fault tolerance than systems kept artificially quiet.

    This sourceDescribes Netflix's controlled failure-injection discipline for distributed systems — deliberately perturbing production to exercise and harden recovery machinery so continuously perturbed systems develop deeper fault tolerance than systems kept artificially quiet; supports marker 069.

• Fuzzing
  • In resilience engineering it is chaos-engineering practice — randomly killing instances or corrupting links to surface latent gaps.

    This sourceFormalizes chaos engineering — injecting random failures (killing instances, corrupting links) into production to surface latent gaps, the resilience-substrate instance of fuzzing.

• Inoculation Theory
  • Reliability engineering. Game days, fault injection, and fuzz testing — pre-attacking one's own system in graded doses to surface weakness while consequences remain bounded.

    This sourceDescribes deliberately injecting controlled faults (game days, fault injection) to build resilience to rare production failures.

• Rehearsal
  • In engineering operations, incident-response game days, chaos exercises, and disaster-recovery failovers maintain response capability before it is needed under real load.

    This sourceDefines chaos engineering / game days: deliberate fault injection into production-like systems to rehearse the whole incident response under near-live conditions.

• Robustness
  • To handle this envelope, the platform implements multiple independent robustness mechanisms: client libraries implement retries with jitter to handle transient failures; API gateways implement rate limiting and backpressure with explicit prioritization of critical transactions over lower-value operations (margin by prioritization); each service runs with independent capacity headroom above nominal peak load (margin by overprovisioning); the fraud-detection subsystem has a fail-safe default (decline on service failure) preserving safety at availability cost; the entire system has been tested under simulated peak loads (100x+ baseline) and induced component failures (chaos engineering)

    This sourceChaos engineering stress testing replica failures.

• Stability
  • Structural engineering: a building's return to its design configuration under wind, seismic, or live load; buckling analysis is the search for loss of stability under increasing load. Neural circuits and software: firing rates settling at characteristic patterns via excitation-inhibition balance; runtime recovery from transient errors via retries, circuit breakers, and autoscaling, with chaos engineering as deliberate perturbation to test stability.

    This sourceDescribes deliberate perturbation of distributed systems to test runtime stability and recovery.

• Stability-Induced Fragility
  • The cleanest modern transfer runs from finance and ecology into software operations: chaos engineering is the stability-induced-fragility counter-intervention applied to distributed systems, deliberately re-introducing the controlled failure that the calm would otherwise let the system forget how to survive.

    This sourceChaos engineering as the controlled-stressor counter-intervention deliberately reintroducing failure into distributed systems.

• Wargaming
  • Negotiation training: devil's-advocate role-play and rehearsal against a sparring partner who attacks the deal. Public-health preparedness: surge tabletops and pandemic exercises. Product strategy: pre-mortems with a competitor-in-the-room role and "kill the product" exercises. Legal preparation and software resilience: moot court and mock trial; chaos engineering and fault-injection campaigns where the chaos is the adaptive red.

    This sourceDefines chaos engineering / fault-injection as deliberately injecting failure into production systems to surface hidden assumptions about resilience.

Mechanisms

• Accommodation Failure and Recovery Rehearsal
  • This is the discipline of chaos engineering — deliberately injecting failures, including compound ones, to learn where a system actually breaks rather than where you assume it will.

    This sourceDefines chaos engineering as deliberately injecting realistic failure conditions and observing actual system behavior to uncover weaknesses that assumptions and specifications miss.

• Inoculation Refresh Drill
  • So the team runs recurring GameDays: on a set cadence

    This sourceDescribes recurring chaos exercises that deliberately inject failures into a limited slice of a production system.

• Substitution Drill
  • Its strength is that it converts an assumed alternative into a proven one and calibrates the reserve and firebreak to reality — it is the only mechanism here that can catch "the second source cannot actually take the load in time," which is precisely the failure that surfaces at the worst possible moment otherwise.

    This sourceBasiri and colleagues describe controlled failure experiments as a way to replace assumption with empirical confidence about system behavior.

Verification

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