Chaos Engineering for Resilience
Controlled failure injection to validate failover, backups, and incident response before real outages.
Chaos Engineering for Resilience
Goals
- Prove multi-AZ failover works
- Validate backups restore within RTO
- Train on-call on realistic failure modes
Safe experiment checklist
- Hypothesis documented
- Blast radius limited (single AZ, canary namespace)
- Rollback plan tested
- Stakeholders notified
- Abort button ready
Example experiments
| Experiment | Validates |
|---|---|
| Terminate random pod | K8s reschedule, PDB |
| Block AZ in load test | Multi-AZ routing |
| Revoke IAM key used by app | Graceful degradation / alert |
| DNS failure injection | Retry and cache behavior |
Tools
- Chaos Mesh / Litmus on Kubernetes
- AWS FIS for EC2/RDS/network faults
- Gremlin for enterprise game days
Output
Each experiment produces a short report: hypothesis, result, gaps, engineering tickets same format as security post-mortems.