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Chaos Engineering — Part 2

Planning your first experiment

9 min readJul 29, 2019

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced chaos engineering and explained how it helps uncover and fix unknowns in your system before they become outages in production; and also how it fosters positive cultural change inside organizations.

While I promised at the end of Part 1 to talk about “the tools and techniques used to inject failures into systems” — I had to follow the “logical” way my mind works.

So, in this post, I’ll instead answer the most common question asked by people who want to start practicing chaos engineering:

“What do you break first?”

Fair question!! And certainly not a question that this panda seems to have the answer to.

Don’t mess with Chaos Panda!

Short answer: Target critical services in your request path.

Long, but wiser answer: There are three areas that you need to invest in, in order to figure out the smartest way to start your chaos engineering…

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Adrian Hornsby
Adrian Hornsby

Written by Adrian Hornsby

I help software organizations improve resilience and achieve operational excellence | Former Principal Engineer at AWS | Follow for posts on resilience

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