Chaos engineering is the latest development in the world of IT and as the name suggests this interpretation of technology is regulated to provide extreme condition results for a dedicated technological piece. Chaos engineering steads forward with a very simple approach and that is to test the integrity or intellectual ability of the system to withstand a turbulent stream of events. Such as server or related networking systems would be bombarded with increased/peak traffic scenarios to test their capability to withstand these changes and providing optimized and quality oriented performance.
Stress testing is another discipline in the world of computing which takes into account the testing of the IT systems under stress conditions and checking their various weak points and how to tackle these vulnerabilities in a best possible way. CE or otherwise chaos engineering is a suitable trend which first originated with the DevOps systems to test the performance of cloud computing systems. The very first intention of using the system was to check the performance of a dedicated piece of IT technology under different conditions. Peak as well as light/normal conditions were presented and the performance values were equally gathered to cross match after the testing was over.
Thousands of nodes within IT servers using the chaos engineering to test the DevOps technology were found to be laying idle, doing nothing at all while costing the organization a serious sum of money. Along with this benchmarks a few other irregularities were found which were later on discarded and corrective actions applied. The long story short is that with the help of Chaos engineering various disciplines of IT and technological aspects can be tested and ran according to the optimized values these can operate on.
Applications of Chaos Engineering within IT
Chaos engineering finds its application in a variety of IT based systems such as with Netflix the Chaos engineering enabled them to move onto the virtual servers from the physical infrastructure and thus began their partnering up with AWS (amazon web services). But on a general scale the Chaos engineering is not that well used with the IT operations due to the shifting of ITOM or IT operation management from the development sections of the information technology. This put the chaos engineering down to the far end of the line but still its services in the open dynamic world are appreciated such as its integration within DevOps and the related systems.
Furthermore, the containerization in cloud applications today has increased far beyond the normal limit and that is why these look more like scalable infrastructures rather being multi-tier architectures. Development and the deployment of the IT systems is lying just a few clicks away and that is what the whole IT industry is doing, using the Chaos engineering for testing the feasible limit of their technology. Multiple benefits of the chaos technology involves testing the systems up to their absolute limits until these give off and can’t hold onto the increased computing pressures. Doing so would help the engineers to come around the actual working capacity or tolerance limit of the systems and that is why the engineers can save these systems from going decapitated in a public crash.
After that you have learned the working and the benefits of the Chaos engineering within the IT based world, how would you suggest to use the services offered by this dynamic IT based element? Well, you would have to go through with the following 5 points;
- Defining the steady states
The first and foremost step for you to perform is to define the current steady limits of your IT based systems. CPU, RAM and the network usage can be monitored and a brief analysis can be done to find about the current working limits of your technology. However, you would have to be consistent with the analysis and find the current working environment which is feasible and wouldn’t add any pressure to the working of these systems such as bottlenecking anything.
- Define optimal conditions
Once that you have found the baseline working conditions you would have to find about the optimal conditions of these systems by spiking things a bit. Such as find about the current utilization of the CPU in a setting where traffic is higher and at the same time find about the latency of the network. Compile a dedicated list featuring the optimal defined conditions of your technological system.
- Develop a hypothesis
The next thing that you need to do is to develop a hypothesis such as where would the system crash pertaining to the added traffic to the systems. Make a logical assumption, would increasing the traffic over the server systems would make the CPU go crazy or would the latency of the networking systems would be affected? Make a list of possible assumptions/hypothesis here so that you can test them when spiking the system with the help of the Chaos engineering.
- Test your systems
Develop a certain scenario in which either an attack is breaking out such as system breach is in progress or the traffic over the network has been increased to a vivid limit, but of course the conditions should be regulated and controlled. There are practically multiple ways to check the integrity and resilience of the networking systems such as taking down the firewalls, ramping up the CPU usage or increasing the bandwidth of the network. As you can see the possibilities are limitless to test your hypothesis.
- Validating the hypothesis
After you have completed the analysis such as tweaking with the system settings, first take down the settings to the optimal limit and let everything function steadily. After that match the new and the old benchmark results and submit your findings. You would be clear with your hypothesis such as did adding more stress to the system made it collapse or was it the other way around.
If you want to work as a professional with the chaos engineering and the server systems then it is recommended that you acquire the Azure DevOps engineer certification as it would make all of it a lot easier.