Chaos Engineering: A Necessity Rather than a Luxury

The phrase ‘chaos engineering’ has leftfield allure, but beneath the label, it’s simply about best practice.

A discipline pioneered at streaming giant Netflix, chaos engineering is “thoughtful planned experiments designed to reveal results to reveal weaknesses in our systems and in our teams and processes.”

That’s the definition lent by Kolton Andrus. He’s former Amazon and Netflix engineering stock, and now founder and CEO of Gremlin, a SaaS platform devoted to bringing chaos engineering principles to major league firms like Walmart, Under Armour, Siemens, and Twilio.

“In the beginning, people were going out and shutting down racks or cutting network cables – and one of those might have caused a side-effect outage,” Andrus said of his time on software builds in the e-commerce giant’s earlier days.