What is Chaos Engineering?

Technology has come a long way, but no system is ever completely safe from failure. Over the years, I’ve worked on and designed systems that try to reduce the risk of outages or failures, but nearly all systems experience some kind of downtime. Even the big companies are not immune to it, so how do they make sure their systems and services are reliable when something inevitably goes wrong? 

That’s where chaos engineering comes in.  It’s a practice that helps teams build more resilient systems by finding weaknesses before they cause real outages.  In this blog post, we’ll explain what chaos engineering is in simple terms, how it relates to DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). 

What is Chaos Engineering?

Chaos Engineering is a methodology that IT teams can use to identify vulnerabilities in complex systems by intentionally injecting failures into the system and observing how that system responds. 

Think of it like office fire drills, where they test that everyone knows where the fire exits are, fire alarm sounds, door opens etc. 

Chaos Engineering is rooted in the principle of intentionally introducing faults into the system to bring benefits to the system in the longer run, such as increased system resilience, improved incident response, and validation of redundancy and failover mechanisms.

The evolution and history of Chaos Engineering 

Most people associate the creation of Chaos Engineering with Netflix, however an AWS engineer called Jesse Robbins is also instrumental in the creation of chaos engineering practices. 

Jesse drew on his experiences of being a volunteer firefighter to introduce the concept of GameDay at Amazon in the early 2000s, to simulate major failures in Amazon’s systems, test and improve their resilience. 

Meanwhile, Netflix was looking at exploring ways to enhance resilience in their systems and in 2010 Netflix introduced a tool called Chaos Monkey which was designed to randomly terminate instances within their production environment to ensure that the system could tolerate failures without impacting users. 

While both were working independently, both contributions were essential in shaping the modern practices of chaos engineering that are widely adopted today.

Chaos Engineering in SRE and DevOps

Chaos engineering is not just a testing technique; it’s a mindset that fits perfectly with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps practices.

SRE teams focus on building systems that are reliable, scalable, and resilient. Chaos engineering gives SREs a proactive way to validate system reliability before real incidents occur.

By running controlled chaos experiments, SRE teams can measure system reliability against SLIs (Service Level Indicators) and SLOs (Service Level Objectives), confirming that uptime and performance targets are met as well as identifying hidden weaknesses in infrastructure, dependencies, and failover mechanisms before they cause downtime.

And chaos engineering complements DevOps by promoting a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and shared responsibility for system reliability.

DevOps teams often integrate chaos experiments into CI/CD pipelines, running small, controlled tests after each deployment to ensure new code doesn’t break critical services. They may also run “game days”, where developers and operations staff deliberately trigger failures in a safe environment to practice response and improve system resilience.

By embedding chaos engineering into everyday DevOps and SRE practices, teams learn to anticipate failures, respond faster, and deliver more reliable systems and software. 

Azure Chaos Studio

Chaos engineering is no longer just an experiment for a few tech giants, it’s becoming a standard practice for companies.

Microsoft offers Azure Chaos Studio, a managed service that enables teams to safely run chaos experiments in their Azure environments, helping organisations test resiliency across virtual machines, databases, and other cloud resources.

You can configure tests to simulate real-world failures against your virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, databases and network components, all within a safe and monitored environment.  You can run tests and leverage Azure Monitor and Application Insights to track system behaviour and understand the impact of failures. 

Conclusion

Chaos engineering isn’t about breaking things for the sake of it, although that can be interesting; chaos engineering is focused on building confidence in your systems and making them more resilient before real incidents happen. 

By intentionally testing failures your IT, DevOps and SRE teams can identify weaknesses, improve incident response and validate redundancy mechanisms.  

Have you introduced chaos engineering into your IT practices?