Part 1. Chaos engineering fundamentals

Building a house tends to be much easier if you start with the foundation. This part lays the foundation for the chaos engineering headquarters skyscraper that we’re going to build in this book. Even if you read only these three chapters, you will see how a little bit of chaos engineering on a real-life system can detect potentially catastrophic problems.

Chapter 2 jumps straight into the action, by showing you how a seemingly stable application can break easily. It also helps you set up the virtual machine to try everything in this book without worrying about breaking your laptop, and covers essentials like the blast radius.

Chapter 3 covers observability and all the tools that you’re going to need to look under the hood of your system. Observability is the cornerstone of chaos engineering—it makes the difference between doing science and guessing. You will also see the USE methodology.

Chapter 4 takes a popular application (WordPress) and shows you how to design, execute, and analyze a chaos experiment on the networking layer. You will see how fragile the application can be to network slowness, so that you can design yours to be more resilient.