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Introducing Chaos Engineering

techblog.netflix.com

1–10 of 31 posts

Re: Introducing Chaos Engineering

#3
I assume that other big internet companies also practice chaos engineering under a different name, but having such a name for the job is awesome. It highlights the difference to traditional stress testing. Names have surprising power. Growth Hacker was a bit annoying but very effective title trend and it helped to communicate the different approach to traditional marketing efforts. I think Chaos Engineer has the same potential.

Re: Introducing Chaos Engineering

#4
Man, I really have the impression that my video-on-demand service has a better understanding of ensuring availability and risk-management than either my bank or any government service.

Could you imagine say a utility company creating a title called 'Chaos Engineer'.

Re: Introducing Chaos Engineering

#5

I assume that other big internet companies also practice chaos engineering under a different name, but having such a name for the job is awesome. It highlights the difference to traditional stress testing. Names have surprising power. Growth Hacker was a bit annoying but very effective title trend and it helped to communicate the different approach to traditional marketing efforts. I think Chaos Engineer has the same…

You're probably right re:other companies doing similar things. Certainly Google does something similar via their "disaster days": http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2371516

Re: Introducing Chaos Engineering

#6
Netflix puts out some great articles about architecture in the cloud. Auto-scaling, chaos monkey, and how they handle 'steal-time.' Does anyone know of any other company that publishes so much about cloud architecture? This is great stuff!

Re: Introducing Chaos Engineering

#7
It's great to see Netflix taking disaster recovery and chaos mitigation seriously. Learning to work with constant failure is one the biggest challenges to anyone working with distributed systems and scale, and concepts like the Chaos Monkey help enormously. I hope other companies follow suit, and soon.

Re: Introducing Chaos Engineering

#8
post #4

Man, I really have the impression that my video-on-demand service has a better understanding of ensuring availability and risk-management than either my bank or any government service. Could you imagine say a utility company creating a title called 'Chaos Engineer'.

It's so true. The entertainment/consumer shopping industries seems to have surpassed banks/governments in availability. It's also pretty ridiculous knowing that some of these companies are tasked with keeping our data/money safe, and yet they still don't allow extremely complex passwords.

Re: Introducing Chaos Engineering

#9
post #6

Netflix puts out some great articles about architecture in the cloud. Auto-scaling, chaos monkey, and how they handle 'steal-time.' Does anyone know of any other company that publishes so much about cloud architecture? This is great stuff!

Most companies their size would use their own servers instead of the cloud.

Re: Introducing Chaos Engineering

#10
post #4

Man, I really have the impression that my video-on-demand service has a better understanding of ensuring availability and risk-management than either my bank or any government service. Could you imagine say a utility company creating a title called 'Chaos Engineer'.

Can you imagine how difficult that would be to justify in a bank or government service? It would be very hard to convince someone in a position of power at an institution like that that deliberately introducing random failures and problems into your production services would be a good idea. Even if it is a good idea, it would be hard to make that argument.

If Netflix's system fails, the worst thing that could happen is you don't get to watch Orange is the New Black. If your bank's system fails, you may lose payments, fail to pay your bills on time, or worse.

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