What Is Chaos Engineering?
Chaos engineering is the disciplined practice of injecting controlled failures, such as killing instances, adding network latency, or exhausting resources, to verify that a system tolerates them gracefully. Experiments start from a hypothesis about steady-state behavior and observe whether the system holds it under stress. The goal is to find brittleness before an unplanned outage does.
Why it matters
Resilience features like retries and failovers are often untested until a real incident exercises them, and then they sometimes do not work. Chaos experiments validate those defenses on purpose, in a controlled blast radius, so weaknesses are fixed proactively rather than discovered at 3 a.m.
Related concepts
- Experiments are bounded by a small blast radius
- Validates circuit breakers, retries, and failover
- Popularized by tools like Chaos Monkey
Related guides
What Is Blast Radius?Blast radius is the scope of damage a single failure, change, or compromise can cause across systems, users,…
What Is a Circuit Breaker?A circuit breaker stops calling a failing dependency for a cooldown period to prevent cascading failures and…
What Is Graceful Shutdown?Graceful shutdown lets a process finish in-flight work and release resources cleanly before exiting, instead…