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Never having heard off 'Chaos Engineering', this seems like a bad case of 'Cargo Cult Engineering'. That starts with the term 'chaos', which has a well-defined

Never having heard off 'Chaos Engineering', this seems like a bad case of 'Cargo Cult Engineering'. That starts with the term 'chaos', which has a well-defined meaning in Chaos Theory, where it is quite obviously borrowed from: small changes in input lead to large changes in output. Neither distributed systems in general, and especially not the sort of system this engineering strives to build, fit that definition. In fact, they are the exact opposite: every part of a typical web stack is already build to mitigate changing demands such as traffic peaks or attacks. The mumbo jumbo around "defining a steady state" and "disproving the null hypothesis" seems like a veneer of sciency on a rather well-known concept: testing. A supreme court justice once said: "Good writing is a $10 thought in a 5 cent sentence". This is the opposite.

johnhenry 9y ago
Arguably the term "chaos" is the common usage associated with randomness and disorder, which different from the way that it's defined in "Chaos Theory".
digitalsushi 9y ago
While I was reading the article, I thought that 'chaos' might derive from the example of the monkey in the server room, that it would be chaos to let a monkey bite your cables. Not saying I'm right, just thought I'd chime in from another perspective.
- newfoundglory 9y ago
  Yea, I'm pretty sure most of it is named after Netflix's Chaos Monkey, and a ton of the resources seem to be directly from them.
drdrey 9y ago
Have you tried to see how that's a useful practice or are you just angry at the name? It is indeed a form of testing, specifically failure/latency injection testing in production systems. It allows you to test hypotheses and fallback scenarios, for instance: you might think that a particular dependency (remote call) is optional and should not affect the availability of your service, running a chaos experiment lets you verify that.
- matt4077 9y ago
  I'm mostly annoyed by the "Manifesto" for overselling a pedestrian idea with rather meaningless literary flourishes.
  - creep 9y ago
    You can cull every method down to a "pedestrian" idea. We build simple solutions for seemingly complicated problems. I don't know anything about chaos engineering, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but from the little I've read it sounds like a set of tools that expand the fuzzing idea for security and reliability in computing systems. Fuzzing in this case would be the simplest form of testing, but the given list elucidates tools that target a desired outcome more directly, and give one more control over the target. I don't know why you are annoyed by this post.
westurner 9y ago
"Resilience Engineering" would be a good alternative term for these failure scenario simulations and analyses. Glossary of Systems Theory > A > Adaptive capacity: > Adaptive capacity: An important part of the resilience of systems in the face of a perturbation, helping to minimise loss of function in individual human, and collective social and biological systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_systems_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_systems_theory

johnhenry 9y ago

Arguably the term "chaos" is the common usage associated with randomness and disorder, which different from the way that it's defined in "Chaos Theory".

digitalsushi 9y ago

While I was reading the article, I thought that 'chaos' might derive from the example of the monkey in the server room, that it would be chaos to let a monkey bite your cables. Not saying I'm right, just thought I'd chime in from another perspective.

newfoundglory 9y ago
Yea, I'm pretty sure most of it is named after Netflix's Chaos Monkey, and a ton of the resources seem to be directly from them.

drdrey 9y ago

Have you tried to see how that's a useful practice or are you just angry at the name? It is indeed a form of testing, specifically failure/latency injection testing in production systems. It allows you to test hypotheses and fallback scenarios, for instance: you might think that a particular dependency (remote call) is optional and should not affect the availability of your service, running a chaos experiment lets you verify that.

matt4077 9y ago
I'm mostly annoyed by the "Manifesto" for overselling a pedestrian idea with rather meaningless literary flourishes.
- creep 9y ago
  You can cull every method down to a "pedestrian" idea. We build simple solutions for seemingly complicated problems. I don't know anything about chaos engineering, so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but from the little I've read it sounds like a set of tools that expand the fuzzing idea for security and reliability in computing systems. Fuzzing in this case would be the simplest form of testing, but the given list elucidates tools that target a desired outcome more directly, and give one more control over the target. I don't know why you are annoyed by this post.

westurner 9y ago

"Resilience Engineering" would be a good alternative term for these failure scenario simulations and analyses. Glossary of Systems Theory > A > Adaptive capacity: > Adaptive capacity: An important part of the resilience of systems in the face of a perturbation, helping to minimise loss of function in individual human, and collective social and biological systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_systems_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_systems_theory