Chaos Engineering — Looking back to look forward

Thoughts on chaos engineering and AWS Fault Injection Simulator

In this blog post, I want to look back a little bit because, as Rachel Carson said:

“To understand the living present and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.” — Rachel Carson

For those who don’t know, Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 — April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

I love this quote and the work Rachel has done for our world — and today, I want to apply her wisdom to chaos engineering.

As you probably already know, Chaos engineering is the process of:

1) stressing an application in testing or production environments by creating disruptive events, such as server outages or API throttling

2) observing how the system responds, and

3) implementing improvements.

And we do that to prove or disprove our assumptions about our system’s capability to handle these disruptive events. But rather than let…