Performing chaos in a serverless world - Failover Conf April 21 2020

Presented at Failover conf April 21st 2020. Recording available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRZWGHUROlc

@gunnargrosch

Chaos engineering is the practice of hypothesis testing through planned experiments to gain a better understanding of a system’s behavior. The principles of chaos engineering have been around for years, and we have now reached the point where chaos engineering has gone from just being a buzzword and practice used by a few large organizations in very specific fields, to it being put in to use by companies of all sizes and industries. Planning and performing chaos experiments on traditional infrastructure with virtual machines and microservices using containers has been battle-tested by many large organizations, but serverless functions and managed services present different failure modes and level of abstraction.

In this talk we focus on how to apply the principles of chaos engineering to serverless, both for serverless functions and managed services. This covers how hypothesis can be formed to fit serverless, what the experiments can achieve and how to practically perform them. With tools for chaos engineering, both commercial and open-source, getting more mature most of them still have focus primarily on virtual machines and containers. We’ll look at what tools are out there to help with chaos experiments for serverless and managed services, but also how you can build your own. Join as we move from talking about the principles to performing real chaos in a serverless world!

Transcript

35. • • • • •
40. • • • • • { "isEnabled": false, "failureMode": "latency", "rate": 1, "minLatency": 100, "maxLatency": 400, "exceptionMsg": "Exception message!", "statusCode": 404, "diskSpace": 100, "blacklist": [ "s3.*.amazonaws.com", "dynamodb.*.amazonaws.com" ] } const failureLambda = require('failure-lambda’) exports.handler = failureLambda(async (event, context) => { ... })