The previous chapter covered what chaos engineering is and what a chaos experiment template looks like. It is now time to get your hands dirty and implement an experiment from scratch! I’m going to take you step by step through building your first chaos experiment, using nothing more than a few lines of bash. I’ll also use the occasion to introduce and illustrate new concepts like blast radius.
DEFINITION
I’ll bet you’re wondering what a blast radius is. Let me explain. Much like an explosive, a software component can go wrong and break other things it connects to. We often speak of a blast radius to describe the maximum number of things that can be affected by something going wrong. I’ll teach you more about it as you read this chapter.