Chaos Engineering: Why Breaking Things Should Be Practiced

As presented at the AWS Summit in Madrid - with Iñaki Alzorriz, Director Platform Engineering at Adidas

With the wide adoption of micro-services and large-scale distributed systems, architectures have grown increasingly complex and hard to understand. Worse, the software systems running them have become extremely difficult to debug and test, increasing the risk of outages. With these new challenges, new tools are required and since failures have become more and more chaotic in nature, we must turn to chaos engineering in order to reveal failures before they become outages. In this talk, we will make an introduction to chaos engineering, a discipline that promotes breaking things on purpose in order to learn how to build more robust systems.

Transcript

1. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Chaos Engineering: Why breaking things should be practiced Adrian Hornsby Sr. Technical Evangelist Amazon Web Services Iñaki Alzorriz Director Platform Engineering Adidas @adhorn
2. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Been there?
3. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Distributed Systems are hard Amazon Twitter Netflix
4. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Failures are a given and everything will eventually fail over time. Werner Vogels CTO – Amazon.com “ “
5. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Resiliency: Ability for a system to handle and eventually recover from unexpected conditions
6. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Partial failure mode
7. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T How do we build resilient software systems?
8. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T People Application Network & Data Infrastructure
9. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Building confidence through testing Unit testing of components: • Tested in isolation to ensure function meets expectations. Functional testing of integrations: • Each execution path tested to assure expected results. Is it enough???
10. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T GameDay at Amazon Creating Resiliency Through Destruction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoz0ZjfrQ9s
11. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Chaos engineering https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy
12. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Failure injection • Start small & build confidence • Application level • Host failure • Resource attacks (CPU, memory, …) • Network attacks (dependencies, latency, …) • Region attack • Human attack https://www.gremlin.com https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy https://chaostoolkit.org
13. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Break your systems on purpose. Find out their weaknesses and fix them before they break when least expected.
14. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Chaos engineering is NOT about breaking things randomly without a purpose, chaos engineering is about breaking things in a controlled environment and through well- planned experiments in order to build confidence in your application to withstand turbulent conditions.
15. S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Chaos Engineering
16. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Steady State Hypothesis Design & Run Experiment Fix Build Resilient Systems Verify & Learn
17. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Build Resilient Systems
18. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Operations Infrastructure Application Software
19. S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Iñaki Alzorriz Director Platform Engineering Adidas
20. IÑAKI ALZORRIZ DIRECTOR PLATFORM ENGINEERING FOSTERING A RESILIENCE & QUALITY MINDSET
21. BUILDING THE DIGITAL TOMORROW FOR THE BEST SPORTS COMPANY IN THE WORLD 15-MAY-19 21
22. WE NEED TO BUILD RESILIENT SYSTEMS 15-MAY-19 22
23. 15-MAY-19 23
24. ADIDAS RUNNING ON AWS AWS Glue Amazon Athena Amazon QuickSight AWS IAM Amazon S3 Amazon SQS Amazon Aurora Amazon SNS AWS Systems Manager AWS Trusted Advisor Amazon DynamoDB Amazon API Gateway AWS Step Functions Amazon Elasticsearch Amazon EBS AWS CloudTrail Amazon EFS Amazon EC2 Amazon Route 53 Amazon SES Amazon RDS Amazon EMR Amazon ECS AWS Lambda Elastic Load Balancing Amazon CloudWatch Amazon GuardDuty AWS KMS
25. GREAT TECHNOLOGY REQUIRES GREAT TEAMS 15-MAY-19 25 technical enablement quality culture
26. OUR CONTAINER ORCHESTRATION BASED ON KUBERNETES 15-MAY-19 26 self-healing autoscaling multi-region Ideal platform for building resilient applications self-service replication
27. OUR CONTAINER ORCHESTRATION BASED ON KUBERNETES 15-MAY-19 27 no readiness/liveness probes autoscaling not configured incorrect usage of request/limits The reality?
28. 15-MAY-19 28 project-seeds runbooks guidelines/whitepapers training awareness guide & consult HOW TO MAKE SURE THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN?
29. FAST DATA PLATFORM make data easily consumable to provide speed 15-MAY-19 29 replication self-service cataloguing by default BDP integrated integration patterns seeds consult
30. OUR MONITORING PLATFORM 15-MAY-19 30 observability by default self-service centralized default-views
31. HELP THE TEAMS MEASURE THEIR SDLC MATURITY 15-MAY-19 31
32. HOW TO SPREAD THE QUALITY CULTURE AND MINDSET? 15-MAY-19 32 We can provide the best platforms and enablers, but the teams are the ones that need to make sure that they build their systems in the way we need them to.
33. WE DON'T ENFORCE, WE ENABLE OUR TEAMS 15-MAY-19 33 SPEED AUTONOMY FREEDOM DECOUPLE EXPERIMENT STANDARD SUSTAINABLE RESILIENCE SCALE
34. DEMOCRATIZATION OF TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT 15-MAY-19 34
35. THE INTRODUCTION OF NEW TECHONOLOGIES IS ALWAYS A CO-CREATION OPPORTUNITY 15-MAY-19 35 We explore together Build & Evaluate in a real case Make sure is mature enough Guidelines & Enablers
36. AS AN EXAMPLE OF DEMOCRATIZATION – ALL THE ENABLERS ARE SHARED AS AN ”INNERSOURCE” INITIATIVE 15-MAY-19 36
37. GAMIFICATION AS A WAY TO ENCOURAGE QUALITY 15-MAY-19 37
38. OUR CHAOS ENVIRONMENT – TEST YOUR APPLICATION FOR RESILIENCE 15-MAY-19 38
39. COMMUNITY EVENTS • Technical onboardings • More than 10 active communities of practices • Biweekly meetings of the engineering community. • adidas tech summit 2019 in Herzogenaurach 15-MAY-19 39
40. DEVOPS CUP 15-MAY-19 40 6 month competition DevOps adoption adapt creativity
41. ENABLE OUR TEAMS & SPREAD THE QUALITY CULTURE TOGETHER WE PLAY TO WIN
42. THANK YOU!
43. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Steady State
44. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T What is steady state? • ”normal” behavior of your system https://www.elastic.co/blog/timelion-tutorial-from-zero-to-hero
45. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T What is steady state? • ”normal” behavior of your system • Business Metric https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/sps-the-pulse-of-netflix-streaming-ae4db0e05f8a
46. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Business metrics at work Amazon: 100 ms of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales (Greg Linden). Google: 500 ms of extra load time caused 20% fewer searches (Marissa Mayer). Yahoo!: 400 ms of extra load time caused a 5–9% increase in the number of people who clicked “back” before the page even loaded (Nicole Sullivan).
47. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Hypothesis
48. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T What if…? “What if this load balancer breaks?” “What if Redis becomes slow?” “What if a host on Cassandra goes away?” ”What if latency increases by 300ms?” ”What if the database stops?” Make it everyone’s problem!
49. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Disclaimer! Don’t make an hypothesis that you know will break you!
50. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Design & Run Experiment
51. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Designing experiment • Pick hypothesis • Scope the experiment • Identify metrics • Notify the organization
52. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Rules of thumbs • Start with very small • As close as possible to production • Minimize the blast radius. • Have an emergency STOP!
53. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Running Chaos Experiment Users Canary deployment Normal Version 99% Users 1% Users Start with ..
54. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Verify & Learn
55. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Quantifying the result of the experiment • Time to detect? • Time for notification? And escalation? • Time to public notification? • Time for graceful degradation to kick-in? • Time for self healing to happen? • Time to recovery – partial and full? • Time to all-clear and stable?
56. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T PostMortems – COE (Correction of Errors) The 5 WHYs Outage Because of … Because of … Because of … Because of … NOT ENOUGH
57. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T More questions to ask • Can you clarify if there were any preceding events? • Why would they believe acting in this way was the best course of action to deliver the desired outcome? • Is there another failure mode that could present here? • What decisions or events prior to this made this work before? • Why stop there – are there places to dig deeper that could shine a light more on this? • Did others step in to help, to advise, or to intercede?
58. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Rules to remember! 1. Failure requires multiple faults 2. There is no isolated ‘cause’ of an accident. 3. There are multiple contributors to accidents.
59. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T DON’T blame that one person …
60. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Fix
61. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Fix
62. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Big challenges to chaos engineering Mostly Cultural • no time or flexibility to simulate disasters. • teams already spending all of its time fixing things. • can be very political. • might force deep conversations. • deeply invested in a specific technical roadmap (micro-services) that chaos engineering tests show is not as resilient to failures as originally predicted.
63. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Big challenges to chaos engineering • Chaos Engineering won’t make your system more robust, People will. • Chaos Engineering won’t replace __all__ the rest (test, quality, …) • Chaos Engineering is NOT the only way to learn from failure • Rollbacks are HARD because of state. • Your systems will continue to fail, sorry.
64. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T “Quality is not an act, it is a habit” Aristotle, some time around 350BC
65. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T Changing culture takes time! Be patient…
66. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T
67. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. S U M M I T More Resources • https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf • https://www.gremlin.com • https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2353017 • https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/ • https://github.com/dastergon/awesome-sre • https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14-paper-yuan.pdf • https://medium.com/@NetflixTechBlog • http://principlesofchaos.org • https://speakerdeck.com/tammybutow/chaos-engineering-bootcamp • https://github.com/adhorn/awesome-chaos-engineering • https://www.infoq.com/presentations/netflix-chaos-microservices • http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/pingdom_uptime_cheat_sheet.pdf • http://willgallego.com/2018/04/02/no-seriously-root-cause-is-a-fallacy • https://medium.com/@adhorn
68. S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
69. Thank you! S U M M I T © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Adrian Hornsby @adhorn https://medium.com/@adhorn