top | item 14299040

(no title)

tehmillhouse | 8 years ago

Isn't this basically what Google has been doing for years with their DiRT exercises?

discuss

order

dastbe|8 years ago

1. Netflix has been doing "chaos engineering" for years (earliest public reference I can find is 2011), especially w.r.t. to public cloud.

2. Netflix has done a great job at publicizing their efforts and open sourcing software that helps you do this kind of testing in a continuous, automated fashion.

So I think the "basically what google has been doing" comment is reductive.

mlafeldt|8 years ago

Good question.

It is true that Google's Disaster Recovery Testing events are also about breaking things on purpose as a means of preparation. However, those events are typically large-scale, company-wide drills targeting not only critical systems but also business processes involving people.

(They even prevent experts from participating to make sure knowledge is spread across the organization. I recommend reading http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2371516 for more.)

As dastbe has pointed out, Chaos Engineering is more about experimenting in a continuous, automated (and hopefully safe) way. Compared to DiRT, experiments are typically smaller in scope, involving fewer people, if any.