The Psychology of Chaos Engineering
A presentation at Conf42: Chaos Engineering 2020 in in London, UK by Matt Stratton
let’s set some agreement
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/
Netflix Technology Blog, 2011 By running Chaos Monkey in the middle of a business day, in a carefully monitored environment with engineers standing by to address any problems, we can still learn the lessons about the weaknesses of our system, and build automatic recovery mechanisms to deal with them. So next time an instance fails at 3 am on a Sunday, we won’t even notice.
https://bit.ly/netflix-chaos
perceptions
“isn’t all engineering chaotic?”
“isn’t all engineering chaotic?”
It’s not about breaking things
It’s not about breaking things
look, I know you know this
I’m gonna say it anyway
these are experiments
we know this, Matty
how we talk about things matters
people get nervous
“You want to do what in production??”
use your monitoring like it’s for real because it is
Something’s broken… …it’s your fault
but what about the people?
how does it make you feel to know Netflix practices chaos engineering?
what about your bank?
data, such as it is
management can get… …nervous
consider your words
it’s about the philosophy
safety first
• 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
https://speaking.mattstratton.com
Pagey Says….
Chaos Engineering, failure injection, and similar practices have verified benefits to the resilience of systems and infrastructure. But can they provide similar resilience to teams and people? What are the effects and impacts on the humans involved in the systems? This talk will delve into both positive and negative outcomes to all the groups of people involved - including users, engineers, product, and business owners.
After seeing this talk, attendees will have a better understanding of the human factors involved in chaos engineering, good practices to care for the people and teams working with chaos, and be even more excited about this practice.
Video
Resources
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
