Chaos Engineering – And why should you enable it in your business

Introduction

When one hears the word “Chaos”, one would normally expect it to be something mischievous or something destructive.

However, when it comes to your business the word “Chaos” could be an essential part of developing it and protecting its integrity and sensitive processes and information.

But one wonders, what exactly is Chaos Engineering and why does one require to know about it? Well, it does not harm to learn about how to enhance your business and organization with this form of process.

What does Chaos Engineering mean?

When it comes to having a strong IT force, Chaos Engineering focuses on risk assessment and identification in a business, organization, or function.

Chaos Engineering is the intricate process of running, experimenting, and examining a computing system to understand how well it will work during times of disruption or turmoil.

One must remember that will be times when unexpected shortcomings or disturbances will strike an organization digitally. Chao Engineering ensures that a particular system or technology is well prepared for such events.

The principles of Chaos Engineering are based on preventing violations and negative business impacts. By enabling a complex software system in an environment where it is closely monitored and administered random disturbances to test its reliability, Chaos Engineering has been revolutionary in the modern digital world. Notably, several digital supergiants like Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, J P Morgan Chase, Gremlin, etc. have integrated Chaos Engineering into their system to deeply understand a system’s behavior and its deficiencies.

How does Chaos Engineering work?

The basic idea of this form of assessment is to place a newly developed complex software under observation and to randomly expose it to disturbances to see how well it can handle and mitigate the impact. This prepares the organization to tackle and prevent any cybercrimes or shortages. Once completed, the organization analyses the reliability of the proposed system and then decides if it should be implemented, modified, or discarded.

Usually, Chaose engineering is completed in a series of steps. The steps might vary slightly across businesses, but are usually similar to the following:

• Set up the criteria and threshold for the given system. Set up an experimental environment and a controlled environment. This step is crucial as based on the criteria laid, one understands the system as “Normal” if within the threshold and “Abnormal” is beyond the threshold.
• Create a hypothesis and include a few defects that could attack the system. Formulate how impactful would the defects be to the system and the organization.
• After this, closely monitor and introduce real-life disruptions to the system to analyze its resilience. Examples include data overloading, overload of traffic, component failures, server breakdowns, network and internet disruptions, data violations, etc.
• Finally, after running the test and assessment, evaluate how resilient the system was to the defects and the problems recorded and appropriately plan modifications or improvements that would be required.

Pros of Chaos Engineering

Considering how revolutionary chaos engineering has been to the digital information sector globally, the most popular Pros of practicing it are:

• It helps organizations understand computing system processes in the real world.
• Increases resilience against potential digital threats.
• Increases system reliability through constant assessments and improvements, thereby strengthening it.
• Provides stakeholder satisfaction.
• Improves performance monitoring

While there are cons to Chaos Engineering, it is worth noting that Companies like Netlifx have developed their testing tool called “Chaos Monkey” to ensure that the technologies used by their firm are resilient enough to tackle most problems. The development of Chaos Engineering is a sure sign that we’ve only just scratched the surface of developing secure and efficient technology.