AzureFunBytes Episode 36 - Intro to Chaos Engineering with @Ana_M_Medina!

AzureFunBytes is a weekly opportunity to learn more about the fundamentals and foundations that make up Azure. It's a chance for me to understand more about what people across the Azure organization do and how they do it. Every week we get together at 11AM Pacific on Microsoft LearnTV and learn more about Azure.

2:33 - Intro.
5:53 - Let's Meet Ana
11:26 - The Principles of Chaos Engineering.
18:01 - What's Ana's definition of Chaos Engineering?
20:56 - Chaos Engineering is the thoughtful, planned experiments designed to reveal a weakness in our systems.
25:59 - How to do Chaos Engineering.
31:12 - No time for excuses!
33:54 - We don't need to break things. They break on their own!
36:21 - We test proactively, instead of waiting for an outage.
37:31 - Experimenting on Azure Kubernetes Service.
44:27 - Viewing impact via Azure Monitor.
50:21 - Should Chaos Engineering be part of our DevOps Pipeline?

This week I welcome Ana Margarita Medina, Senior Chaos Engineer and Developer Advocate from Gremlin to discuss Chaos Engineering on Azure. What exactly is Chaos Engineering? Well, the Principles of Chaos Engineering paper defines it as so:

Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

Sometimes we can prepare for the worst. This includes creating plans that help us mitigate failure, but much of that failure is difficult to predict in the context of a deployed application. Rather than leave things to chance, Chaos Engineering looks to increase the resiliency of your IT solutions by creating failure in planned scenarios. These scenarios can be part of larger "game days" that seek out to find single points of failure, determine impact across the application, and allow teams to solve problems before they occur in production.

Testing in production can be critical for the long-term success of your application because you apply failure in real-time. The Microsoft Docs page on Chaos Engineering recommends applying this methodology when you are:

Deploying new code.
Adding dependencies.
Observing changes in usage patterns.
Mitigating problems.

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