Today, the entire world is connected, and the fourth industrial revolution is only blurring the physical and digital boundaries more. However, when applications, networks, and IT infrastructure amid such profound congruence fail, they are bound to have a negative impact on a business’s operations.

Gartner has previously estimated that organizational damage can range from $140,000 to $540,000 per hour due to IT downtime. This impact can be seen in terms of customer dissatisfaction, poor brand image, lost productivity, increased operational costs, revenue losses, and more. But at the same time, it is largely unavoidable due to the increasing complexity of IT distributed systems. 

Today, most businesses utilize microservice architecture, cloud computing, and a lot of moving parts as they go about building their application toolkit. While the benefits of these approaches are manifold, they’re not free from potential failures. As soon as you launch a software or application, you become dependent on the environment it runs in.

Here, testing for mishaps becomes extremely important. With the complexity of cloud-native architecture and digital transformation initiatives, it is vital to ensure applications can withstand the chaos within the development environment — precisely where chaos testing or chaos engineering comes into the picture.

What Is Chaos Engineering?

Chaos engineering is an approach to testing the integrity and resilience of a system within the production environment. It ensures that proactive measures are taken before the system leads to downtime or negative user experiences. To that end, the core principles of chaos engineering include the following:

• Steady-state hypothesis: When the program delivers the expected output, it can be considered to be working in a steady position. The hypothesis is made that the system will continue in a steady state whenever the chaos experiment is run.

• Setting the quality metrics: The data related to the system, testing, and production environment is collected to set the quality metrics. Frequent evaluation of programs needs to be done to ensure the ongoing behavior of the system and prevent potential outages.

• Resilience experiments: The chaos is introduced to cause the program to fail deliberately. The execution of experiments can be automated to analyze the experimental results.

• Monitoring and repeating experiments: The key is to run experiments in the production environment and pinpoint the weaknesses to build a reliable and resilient system.

Application of Chaos Testing in Product Engineering

Chaos testing is being practiced by many tech giants, including Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, to improve the resilience of their application infrastructure. Netflix used Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure for streaming purposes. When AWS suffered a major outage in 2012, Netflix wanted to ensure that this outage would not affect their streaming experience. So, they created a suite of tools that supported the principles of chaos engineering. 

Chaos Monkey, a tool created by the engineering team of Netflix, was leveraged to test the system’s resilience. It runs the experiments in the production environment rather than in a simulated environment to test the system’s stability and check its response in real time. Such examples are a testament to the potential that chaos engineering holds for driving application reliability initiatives – especially in the wake of the application modernization wave, the surge in cloud-native development, and the widely prevalent reliance on DevOps and automation.

Why Use Chaos Testing?

In the DevOps process, most testing processes are automated, and the software is delivered without much manual testing and evaluations. For the same reason, testers should conduct chaos testing. Although chaos testing is not a core testing focus, it certainly contributes to the reliability of the application or service. It enables IT teams to test the applications for many unpredictable events within the production environment.

Benefits of Chaos Testing

Chaos testing offers numerous advantages that enhance the robustness and efficiency of software applications. By intentionally introducing disruptions, chaos testing helps identify and address weaknesses, ensuring systems are prepared for unexpected challenges.

• Increased Reliability and Resilience: Evaluates software performance under stress, making applications more robust against failures.

• Direct Feedback to Developers: Provides valuable insights that developers can use to implement design changes and drive innovation.

• Enhanced Incident Response: By understanding failure scenarios, teams can improve their response, repair, and troubleshooting processes.

• Reduced Downtime and Better Collaboration: Faster response times and increased resilience lead to less downtime and improved teamwork.

• Higher Application Performance: Ensures high performance of applications, resulting in better user experiences and customer satisfaction.

• Cost Efficiency: Reduces costs related to managing failures, wasted resources, and application maintenance, thereby improving the business’s bottom line.

Get Started with Chaos Engineering

In today’s world, no system is safeguarded from outages or failures. The good thing is that the impact of system or application failure on customers, partners, employees, and business reputation can be significantly lessened and altogether prevented by proactively addressing issues and identifying the path to system recovery.

Chaos engineering, as a part of testing strategy, can work wonders to improve the resilience of applications and IT infrastructure. As a dedicated testing partner, Forgeahead can help in successfully driving application testing and engineering initiatives. Talk to our chaos engineering experts today!

FAQ

Why is Chaos Testing important?

Chaos Testing is important because it helps identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities in systems before they cause real-world issues. By proactively testing for failures, organizations can improve their system’s reliability, stability, and fault tolerance.

How does Chaos Testing differ from traditional testing?

Traditional testing typically focuses on validating expected behavior under controlled conditions. Chaos Testing, on the other hand, introduces unexpected and random failures to observe how the system responds, aiming to uncover hidden issues that might not be evident in conventional tests.

What are the key principles of Chaos Testing?

Key principles include starting with a hypothesis about system behavior, conducting tests in a controlled manner, minimizing blast radius to avoid widespread disruption, and learning from the results to improve system resilience.

What tools are commonly used for Chaos Testing?

Common tools for Chaos Testing include Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, Litmus, and Chaos Toolkit. These tools help automate the process of injecting failures and monitoring system responses.

What are the potential risks of Chaos Testing?

Potential risks include causing unintended service disruptions, data loss, and negative user experiences. To mitigate these risks, tests should be conducted in controlled environments with careful planning and communication.

What role does monitoring play in Chaos Testing?

Monitoring is crucial for Chaos Testing as it provides real-time insights into system behavior during tests. Effective monitoring helps detect anomalies, assess the impact of failures, and gather data to inform improvements in system design and resilience.