Chaos Monkey Tests by Netflix
Japneet Sachdeva
Full Stack QA - SDET | 10k+ students | QA & SDET courses | YouTube creator | TopMate Mentor | Medium Writer | Udemy Instructor | Weekly Newsletter
Netflix uses a technique or say system which purposefully throws it or breaks it in production or replicated production environments. Now once the system is down, they track how effectively the system manages to come back up.
This practice or test process can be called as Chaos Engineering, which has primary focus on reliability of a system. It aims to improve the resilience of complex systems by injecting controlled chaos into them and observing how they respond.
What does Chaos Monkey do?
This tool plays a crucial role in testing the fault tolerance of Netflix's production environment. By randomly terminating instances within the system, the Chaos Monkey simulates failures that can occur in real-world scenarios.
During business hours, these VMs are turned off. The primary objective is to observe how their systems handle unexpected outages and ensure they are fault-tolerant.
Why Chaos Monkey was developed?
Netflix operates a massive, globally distributed, cloud-based platform with millions of daily users. This type of environment is inherently complex and prone to failures at various levels, such as:
Traditional testing methods were insufficient for validating the resilience of their infrastructure. To address this, Netflix embraced the philosophy of "design for failure"—building systems capable of tolerating unexpected disruptions.
How Chaos Monkey Works
Chaos Monkey operates by:
This random failure simulation helps identify weak points in the architecture and ensures that teams build redundancy and fault-tolerance into the system.
Note: These VMs are utilised through AWS.
What should we learn from Chaos Monkey Tests?
Netflix has successfully used Chaos Monkey to identify and address weaknesses in their cloud-based systems, ensuring high availability for their streaming platform. This approach has inspired many organisations to adopt Chaos Engineering principles to improve their system reliability.
Quality is the topmost priority for any organisation who wants to serve their customers the best. Quality can be a way to improve your workflows, cloud systems, software applications etc.
References: https://netflix.github.io/chaosmonkey/Configuring-behavior-via-Spinnaker/
-x-x-
950+ SDET Interview Q&A + Free SDET Practice Resources: Link
Full Stack QA & Automation Course: Link
Industry level Automation Framework Course: https://www.udemy.com/course/proficient-automation-tester-by-leveraging-docker-with-cicd/?couponCode=BFCPSALE24
#japneetsachdeva
Quality Engineer Leader
4moGreat article @Japneet Sachdeva!! I agree. Chaos engineering involves intentionally introducing faults into a system to assess and enhance its resilience under adverse conditions. Organizations like Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Voyages-sncf.com have adopted chaos engineering practices to proactively identify and address system vulnerabilities, fostering a culture of continuous improvement. When selecting chaos testing tools, it's essential to consider: System Architecture Compatibility: Ensure the tool aligns with your existing infrastructure. Ease of Integration: Opt for tools that integrate seamlessly with your current systems. Failure Scenarios: Choose tools capable of simulating the specific failures relevant to your environment. Additionally, implementing robust monitoring and rollback procedures is crucial to manage potential risks associated with introducing faults into your system.
Test Automation Engineer at Intact
8moJapneet Sachdeva I also have read about chaos engineering recently as part of my DevOps course from York University. Its amazing how this practice helps organizations prepare for unexpected failures by intentionally introducing disruptions into their systems. So many microservices and interactions between them has made systems more complex and its hard for human to predict potential failures. These exercises are so useful for finding hidden problems and making the systems more reliable and resilient. I believe more companies will adopt it near future