The Psychology of Chaos Engineering

A presentation at DevOpsDays Baltimore 2019 in April 2019 in Baltimore, MD, USA by Matt Stratton

Slide 1

The Psychology of Chaos Engineering Matty Stratton, PagerDuty @mattstratton

Slide 2

Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. https://principlesofchaos.org/ @mattstratton

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What chaos engineering is NOT @mattstratton

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@mattstratton

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It’s not about breaking things @mattstratton

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@mattstratton

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Experimenting in production is preferred @mattstratton

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You can’t do this without good measurement @mattstratton

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Minimize your blast radius @mattstratton

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Some helpful tools • Netflix Simian Army - https://principlesofchaos.org/ • Gremlin - https://www.gremlin.com/ • ChaosToolkit - https://chaostoolkit.org/ @mattstratton

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But what about the people? @mattstratton

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How does it make you feel to know Netflix practices chaos engieering? @mattstratton

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What about your bank? @mattstratton

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@mattstratton

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Management can get… …nervous @mattstratton

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Consider your words @mattstratton

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It’s about the philosophy @mattstratton

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@mattstratton

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Safety first @mattstratton

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• Know your conditions - when will you shut down the experiment? • This isn’t about causing stress on your people - be transparent • There are humans at the other end of those numbers @mattstratton

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Further Reading • Chaos Engineering Traps - Nora Jones bit.ly/2Pr53ZH • ChaosCat: Automating Failure Injection at PagerDuty bit.ly/2UCbdXN • ChaoSlingr: Introducing Security into Chaos Testing bit.ly/2GDZN1V @mattstratton