OpenText home page.
Tech topics

What is Chaos Engineering?

Illustration of IT items with focus on a lightbulb

Overview

Ask any project manager, developer, or team leader. Several things can go wrong during the software development life cycle, such as glitches, cyberattacks, and system outages. Unexpected failures are bound to happen, which can disrupt the entire process, limit results, and waste vital resources.

Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering is a discipline that studies how these failures can occur and provides methodologies to help avoid them. By understanding the root cause of failures, chaos engineers can develop plans to prevent or mitigate them.

Chaos engineering is not about creating chaos; it's about using controlled experiments to identify potential points of failure in a system before they cause problems. By doing so, chaos engineers can proactively prevent outages and other disruptions.

What exactly is Chaos Engineering?

Chaos engineering is the practice of intentionally injecting faults into a system to test its resilience. The goal is to identify potential failure points and correct them before they cause an actual outage or other disruption.

There are many ways to create chaos in a system, but the most important thing is to have a plan. Without a plan, it's easy to create more problems than you solve. When creating your plan, you'll need to decide what you want to test and how you're going to do it. You can then start experimenting once you have a plan.

Software developers can easily introduce chaos engineering into their workflows with OpenText™ Professional Performance Engineering, OpenText™ Enterprise Performance Engineering, or OpenText™ Core Performance Engineering. Not only do these solutions leverage performance load testing, but they make it easy to run other chaos engineering experiments directly within the software.

By creating these events in a controlled non-production environment, you can test how your system reacts and identify any potential problems.

Once you've identified potential failure points, you can start working on mitigating them. This might involve adding monitoring or logging to help identify issues when they occur or changing your design to make it more resilient to failures.

What are Chaos Engineering principles?

The principles of chaos engineering are:

  • Plan: Decide what you want to test and how you're going to do it. The goal here is to create a hypothesis. What could go wrong in a system? What are some potential vulnerabilities that can be exploited?
  • Experiment: Inject faults into the system and see how it reacts. Fault injection is simply the process of introducing a problem into an existing system to expose a vulnerability. It’s essentially the habit of “throwing a wrench” into a system on purpose to see what happens.
  • Analyze: Use the data from your experiments to identify potential failure points.
  • Mitigate: If you find an issue, you can end your experiment to focus on mitigating it. Otherwise, you can scale your experiment until you’re at the crux of the issue.

What are the benefits of Chaos Engineering?

So why would any company break things on purpose? Exposing system flaws is necessary to make it more robust. Chaos engineering can help you avoid outages and other disruptions. By identifying potential failure points and correcting them before they cause problems, you can proactively prevent disruptions.

In addition, chaos engineering provides several customer, business, and technical benefits. The main benefit is allowing companies to create stronger products that will impact their bottom line and meet customer expectations.

Chaos Engineering, also known as resiliency testing, can help companies comply with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) which aims to regularly test the resiliency of systems to assess vulnerabilities.

How is Chaos Engineering different from testing?

Chaos engineering is different from testing in a few key ways. Chaos engineering focuses on finding potential failure points before they cause problems. Testing, on the other hand, focuses on verifying the system works as expected. In short, chaos engineering is proactive while testing is reactive.

Chaos engineers work to prevent outages and other disruptions by introducing and correcting controlled failures before they could cause problems in a live environment. These controlled failures help identify which parts of the system are more resilient and which need more work. Testing can only verify that the system works after it’s finished.

How is it similar to OpenText Professional Performance Engineering?

OpenText Professional Performance Engineering is a tool that primarily focuses on a specific type of performance engineering. Using OpenText Professional Performance Engineering, you can deploy advanced load testing that simulates real-world usage conditions, which can help you identify potential load performance issues before they cause problems.

But OpenText Professional Performance Engineering isn’t simply a performance engineering tool that runs load tests in a stable environment; it’s a tool that combines both performance engineering and chaos engineering into one platform.

OpenText Professional Performance Engineering works directly with Gremlin, a renowned failure-as-a-service (FaaS) platform that enables you to create different types of chaos events such as CPU spikes, network latency, and disk failure. You can easily organize and initiate Gremlin chaos experiments directly within OpenText Professional Performance Engineering and run load tests based on abnormal conditions.

Overall, OpenText Professional Performance Engineering enables you to proactively prevent load disruptions during different types of chaos events. By identifying potential failure points before they cause problems, this tool can help save time, money, and valuable resources.

Put Chaos Engineering into effect with performance engineering solutions

Ultimately, chaos engineering is the impetus of any successful software project. Software developers can implement chaos engineering to carry out projects that will stand the test of time.

Through OpenText's partnerships with Gremlin and Steadybit, OpenText performance engineering solutions can test the performance of systems under load and different chaos events simultaneously, enabling you to find potential failure points and correct issues proactively.

Related products

Performance engineering

Make customers happy by delivering high-quality, reliable applications

OpenText™ Professional Performance Engineering

Deliver a flawless customer experience with project-based testing

OpenText™ Enterprise Performance Engineering

Foster collaboration and improve application reliability with testing

OpenText™ Core Performance Engineering

Ensure application quality with scalable, cloud-based testing

See all related products

How can we help?

Footnotes