4 ms·

What's the difference between "Chaos Engineering" and fault injection, which has been around since 1970~?

nyokodo 6y ago
Chaos Engineering is fault injection being incorporated as a core aspect of a production system. So whereas in the 1970s fault injection might have been more used in the development and test phases, Chaos Engineering also includes a bunch of persistent services knocking out key aspects of your production system.
- hammock 6y ago
  So basically you are writing tests that break things, and then keeping that code in the final compile?
  - ulam2 6y ago
    You nailed it
    - hammock 6y ago
      Reminds me of these kinds of tables: https://www.google.com/search?q=broken+glass+table&rlz=1C5GCEA_en&sxsrf=ALeKk0306UvLBo4WafGo4fY2pnkcGP0F5g:1603801893558&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=-p8n4PjYmb69GM%252CZB7Q3vDYL49qlM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kTBwXyqfi_Tm_8AOpiXYDLYAb5QGg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi47p7R49TsAhWahXIEHeNODMoQ9QF6BAgJEE0&biw=1227&bih=648#imgrc=-p8n4PjYmb69GM https://www.google.com/search?q=broken+glass+table&rlz=1C5GC... Wherein the table is made, then shattered, but keeps its functionality :)
spooneybarger 6y ago
Fault injection is a technique. Chaos engineering is a discipline.
- clr42 6y ago
  Yes; to expand on that a bit -- you can do fault injection in a chaos experiment. You can also do many other things within an experiment that would be difficult to classify as fault injection; for example, a sharp increase in the number of customers making requests to your service isn't really a fault. Chaos Engineering then wraps all of those techniques in a framework of experimentation and analysis. That's the discipline, which encourages you to proactively make improvements to Availability, and now Security as well.
bigiain 6y ago
Mostly better marketing... I'll bet "Chaos Engineers" get paid two or three times whatever the role that did "fault injection" got.
mxyzplk 6y ago
While I agree with the other replies, I think there is some interesting alignment with fault injection - while it's "been around," if you consider the big three concerns of availability, performance, and security, there is a rich set of tooling and frameworks and discipline and best practices around the latter two, performance testing and management and security testing and management, but for availability not so much. There's "uptime monitoring" and there's "write your own ad hoc failure injection" and not a lot of agreed techniques around it. A number of the open source "chaos engineering" tools are really "just" failure injection tools but that's still pushing the state of the art forward IMO.

Chaos Engineering is fault injection being incorporated as a core aspect of a production system. So whereas in the 1970s fault injection might have been more used in the development and test phases, Chaos Engineering also includes a bunch of persistent services knocking out key aspects of your production system.

hammock 6y ago
So basically you are writing tests that break things, and then keeping that code in the final compile?
- ulam2 6y ago
  You nailed it
  - hammock 6y ago
    Reminds me of these kinds of tables: https://www.google.com/search?q=broken+glass+table&rlz=1C5GCEA_en&sxsrf=ALeKk0306UvLBo4WafGo4fY2pnkcGP0F5g:1603801893558&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=-p8n4PjYmb69GM%252CZB7Q3vDYL49qlM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kTBwXyqfi_Tm_8AOpiXYDLYAb5QGg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi47p7R49TsAhWahXIEHeNODMoQ9QF6BAgJEE0&biw=1227&bih=648#imgrc=-p8n4PjYmb69GM https://www.google.com/search?q=broken+glass+table&rlz=1C5GC... Wherein the table is made, then shattered, but keeps its functionality :)

spooneybarger 6y ago

Fault injection is a technique. Chaos engineering is a discipline.

clr42 6y ago
Yes; to expand on that a bit -- you can do fault injection in a chaos experiment. You can also do many other things within an experiment that would be difficult to classify as fault injection; for example, a sharp increase in the number of customers making requests to your service isn't really a fault. Chaos Engineering then wraps all of those techniques in a framework of experimentation and analysis. That's the discipline, which encourages you to proactively make improvements to Availability, and now Security as well.

bigiain 6y ago

Mostly better marketing... I'll bet "Chaos Engineers" get paid two or three times whatever the role that did "fault injection" got.

mxyzplk 6y ago

While I agree with the other replies, I think there is some interesting alignment with fault injection - while it's "been around," if you consider the big three concerns of availability, performance, and security, there is a rich set of tooling and frameworks and discipline and best practices around the latter two, performance testing and management and security testing and management, but for availability not so much. There's "uptime monitoring" and there's "write your own ad hoc failure injection" and not a lot of agreed techniques around it. A number of the open source "chaos engineering" tools are really "just" failure injection tools but that's still pushing the state of the art forward IMO.