What is chaos engineering?
Chaos engineering uses controlled experiments to study how a system behaves under failure.
How it works and where it is used
First define normal behavior, then safely simulate a lost server, network delay or dependency failure. The aim is to test resilience assumptions, not break things at random. Scope, stop conditions and user impact are defined beforehand.
Limits, safety and selection criteria
Production experiments require mature monitoring, rollback and team communication; staging may be the right first step for critical services. Feed lessons back into architecture and operations. Injecting faults without measuring outcomes is not a meaningful experiment. To test a backup network path, a primary link can be disabled in a controlled experiment. Measure user-request success, latency and recovery time rather than only a server’s up status. Everyone should know who can stop the experiment. Failure should expose gaps in dependencies and procedures, not become an exercise in blaming people. Repeating the scenario after a fix tests whether the improvement lasts. Begin with a small blast radius and expand only as evidence supports the system’s resilience.