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**Gerhard Lazu:** Thank you. So that's great. Maybe by the time you're listening this, the course will be free, or just like a week or two weeks away from becoming available, so you can take it. And that is the free part. I'm sure that there will be a course that people will be able to pay you for it if they want to, r... |
**Katie Gamanji:** Yeah, the entire nano-degree is paid. That's why people are currently asking "Where is the free material?" So the entire nano-degree actually has a price; so if you wanna take it as part of the nano-degree, maybe your organization already has an affiliation to Udacity, which means you don't have to p... |
However, if someone would like to do it, you'll have to take the entire nano-degree and pay for it. That's the only option. Once it's available as a standalone material, I'm gonna be able to share it free for you... Because the feedback so far I've been receiving - it's actually great, because I've been developing this... |
One of the motivations, again, for me, is to grow the next generation of cloud-native practitioners, to make it easier for them to transition within a role that has cloud-native elements. And I've been developing this, but I haven't seen any results. Now I'm actually starting to see those, and it's really delightful to... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Thank you, Katie. That sounds wonderful. Thank you for putting in the time, for caring enough about this, because it is important, but maybe many people don't realize just how important it is... As time goes by, I'm sure this will become even more and more relevant, and people will enjoy that such gre... |
If you have not heard of this course, go and check it out. It will be in the show notes. Give Katie feedback, what you liked, what you didn't like, how she can improve it, because there's always scope for that, to improve, to make it better... But I think you will really enjoy what's already out there. If you just look... |
Katie, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for sharing this with us. I look forward to speaking with you sometime soon. |
**Katie Gamanji:** Thank you for having me. There is one last thing I would like to mention - taking the course is just the first step. One thing that I'm actually calling out at the end of the course is "Do reach out to the community", and I'm expecting everyone in the cloud-native community. I think this is an action... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Thank you, Katie. |
• Reliability of systems and infrastructure is often assumed, but failures can occur at any time |
• Chaos engineering is a method for testing system resiliency by introducing artificial faults |
• Importance of chaos engineering in preventing costly downtime and improving overall reliability |
• Applying chaos engineering principles to specific systems such as CDNs and complex microservices environments |
• Need for developers, SREs, and site reliability engineers to work together to fix root causes of failures |
• Chaos engineering involves testing at multiple levels, including infrastructure dependencies and service reliability. |
• Definition of chaos engineering |
• Importance of steady-state hypothesis and understanding system behavior |
• Injecting harm (faults) to build immunity (resilience) |
• Scientifically trying to understand user happiness through metrics, logs, and events |
• Willful fault injection to verify system behavior and identify tolerance limits |
• Applying non-best practices in small doses for security and performance testing |
• Chaos engineering as a practice to intentionally break and test systems to improve resilience |
• Importance of learning from failures rather than successes in software development |
• Applying chaos engineering to monolithic applications, not just microservices |
• Tools and platforms for chaos engineering, such as LitmusChaos |
• Best practices for implementing chaos engineering, including playing the role of a person outside the system, using good metrics and monitoring, and starting with small experiments in pre-production environments |
• Litmus is an open-source, CNCF project that provides chaos engineering capabilities for Kubernetes environments. |
• It can be installed as a Helm chart or operator with its own CRDs. |
• The control plane of Litmus sets up the account and user access, while the agent infrastructure is where experiments are executed. |
• Argo workflows are used to construct scenarios, and Argo CD integrates with Litmus for GitOps support. |
• Litmus can be triggered by event tracker functionality via Argo CD updates or other GitOps tools. |
• It supports storing chaos artifacts in Git, allowing changes to reflect on the chaos center. |
• Users without Kubernetes can spin up a small cluster to use Litmus and create chaos scenarios for non-Kubernetes environments. |
• Running databases on Kubernetes is discussed, with Uma expressing that it's becoming more feasible due to active community support. |
• Stateful sites and distributed databases are key elements in Kubernetes |
• Storage systems and containerized storage solutions (e.g. OpenEBS) are evolving for running databases on Kubernetes |
• Networking issues, such as latency and packet loss, can impact database replication and performance |
• Distributed application architecture, such as message brokers, can make it easier to run on Kubernetes |
• Chaos engineering is essential for testing failures in Kubernetes environments and improving resilience |
• Different platforms (e.g. AWS, GCP, Linode) have varying recovery times and require tailored approaches |
• Infrastructure matters and needs to be considered when running databases on Kubernetes |
• The importance of testing reliability in production, rather than just in staging |
• Chaos engineering as a tool for simulating failures and improving system resilience |
• The value of creating random triggers to test systems after changes are made in production |
• The need for a culture of continuous chaos engineering at all levels of an organization |
• The ultimate goal of chaos engineering is to be able to confidently break things in production, thereby ensuring system reliability |
**Gerhard Lazu:** If the network is not reliable, and that was a thing that it is, they will be in for a surprise. Unless you've had some network outages, or some packet loss, or even like at your home, you always think it will work, there won't be any problems. Well, it doesn't work like that in reality. Disks fail al... |
CDNs fail all the time. In episode \#10 we talked about how Fastly failed for a few minutes and half the internet went down. That was an interesting one. So how do you know that the beautifully-crafted code that you ship continuously, it's test-driven, it's beautiful, it gets out there - how do you know that it'll cont... |
**Uma Mukkara:** That's right, the chaos engineering - it was being viewed in a little bit different way earlier. It was purely for stopping the outages; SREs were tasked with the - you know, "I tried everything, but now can you do something? You are a super-SRE." "Okay, let me do chaos engineering." But I believe it's... |
\[04:15\] Chaos engineering is a little bit more than a tough piece that is meant for super-SREs. Now chaos engineering is more of a good and easy and a must-have tool for DevOps, as long as you're trying to improve something on reliability. You're right, it's about reliability; nothing is reliable, not just networks. ... |
So I believe chaos engineering is still an evolving subject, and it has evolved in the last few years from being purely a fascination for an SRE, as an expert subject for an SRE, into more of a must-have, good-to-have tool for all sorts of roles, ranging from SRE, all the way to developer. That's my observation at leas... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, chaos engineering is important. It's an evolving topic, it's a field that changes quite a bit... It's chaotic (pun intended). So why is it important, Karthik? Why is chaos engineering important for shipping code and writing code? What is the link there? |
**Karthik Satchitanand:** I think you mentioned about Fastly going down for a few minutes, and that took half the internet down with it... And I'm sure it has cost a lot. Downtimes are extremely costly. You would want to avoid them dearly. And there is enough motivation for you to test how reliable your systems are. |
Like Uma mentioned, it's not something that you only do in production, though that is fair, the benefits of chaos engineering has been most realized for the last decade or so... But it is important that you go ahead and test your systems, because there is so much changing there in your deployment environment all the ti... |
In today's microservices world, the application that you're deploying in your deployment environment - it could be Kubernetes, or it could be somewhere on the cloud - there are so many other moving parts that you depend on to give you that wholesome experience for the user. Things that help developers support SREs and ... |
Chaos engineering is a lot about learning your systems as well. Many times we assume certain infrastructure aids while developing code, which turn out to be untrue when you're actually deploying it... And you really want to know what's going to happen when things fail in the infra side. So yes, I think that is really a... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So taking that, how do you chaos-engineer a CDN? That's just one that you have in your system... How do you apply chaos engineering principles to test the resiliency of your CDN? Can you do that even? |
**Karthik Satchitanand:** \[08:07\] I think ultimately you would host your CDN on infrastructure that you're either putting on your own data centers, or on the cloud. So ultimately, anything that's powering software is ultimately built on some platform... And you could ahead and start off by checking what happens when ... |
So you can check the extent of high availability that you have built in by targeting some very simple infrastructure faults. I would say that would be a good starting point. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. What do you think, Uma? Anything to add? |
**Uma Mukkara:** I mean, the CDN is a complex topic. Which part of a CDN are you talking about? Delivery, your networks need to be reliable, your supporting infrastructure needs to be reliable, and the software that runs the CDN needs to be reliable. |
The idea of applying chaos engineering to your CDN is to improve something that's already mostly reliable. Today, a CDN is reliable. We all work on the internet. But it is services like Fastly going down once in a year, or even less often. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, the first time in five years for us. |
**Uma Mukkara:** \[unintelligible 00:10:02.10\] "Hey, something has happened, even though I applied chaos engineering to it." In reality, it's not that simple, in my opinion. Site reliability itself is in engineering. Chaos is in engineering. So engineering comes with understanding what's going on, and there's no uniqu... |
So I would say you can apply chaos engineering not just only to a CDN - to any other system, but really looking at the way the services are architected or deployed. And look at the services and see, "Is there something that I can see as a low-hanging fruit that's either doubtful about reliability, or constantly causing... |
So if you ask me to summarize the whole chaos engineering for a CDN, it needs to be at different levels, in cost structure and cost structure again is storage and network. If I recollect some of the scenarios that I heard of, it's always about a slow storage that caused more of a bigger issue all of a sudden and it nev... |
\[12:18\] So one is about verifying how reliable is your infrastructure dependency. Try to introduce some slownesses intentionally and keep verifying your CDN continues to work. That's one level. The other level is take a look at your services and how reliable you are, and then if networks go slow, or storage goes slow... |
So as I said, it's engineering, and that's why we need good tools for site reliability engineers. That's chaos engineering. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That makes perfect sense to me. So if I had to summarize what chaos engineering is in one short sentence, to me that would be the injection of artificial faults - they're not real, they're artificial; they're made, we make them - to see how the system as a whole reacts to those artificial faults. Woul... |
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