Principles of Chaos Engineering

In this lesson, we will define chaos engineering and the principles behind it.

What is chaos engineering?

We can describe chaos engineering as a discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. Now, if that is too confusing and you prefer a more straightforward definition of what chaos engineering is, I can describe as being prepared because bad things will happen. It is inevitable.

What are the principles behind it?

Bad things happen, often, when we don’t expect them. Instead of being reactive and waiting for unexpected outages and delays, we employ chaos engineering and to simulate adverse effects that might occur in our system. Through these simulations, we can learn what the outcomes of our experiments are and how we can improve our system by making it resilient and by trying to design it in a way that it is capable of withstanding unfavorable conditions in production.


In the next lesson, we will discuss if you are ready for carrying out chaos experiments or not.