There’s more to chaos engineering than deliberately breaking stuff in production. With this book, QA engineers as well as program and product managers will examine the theory, history, and implementation of this full-fledged software engineering discipline. Chaos experts Casey Rosenthal, Nora Jones, and Nathan Aschbacher will bring you up to speed on this practice for finding failures within your application, network, and infrastructure.

As the software industry continues to move toward microservices and other complex, distributed systems, fewer people are able to hold a working picture of the entire system in their minds. Complexity can’t be removed from these systems, but new methodologies allow engineers to navigate the complexity while optimizing for business goals such as feature velocity, performance, and fault tolerance. This book guides you through chaos engineering and demonstrates how this methodology can help you optimize for availability.

Casey Rosenthal formalized the practice of Chaos Engineering by co-writing and publishing the definition http://principlesofchaos.org/ with the Chaos Team at Netflix, which he managed for three years. He put together a conference on the topic called Chaos Community Day, the only conference dedicated to Chaos Engineering, which is now entering its fourth year. Casey also manages the Chaos Engineering Community Google Group and co-wrote the Chaos Engineering O’Reilly report. He is currently CTO at Backplane.io, a company that provides reliable and resilient infrastructure.

Nora Jones is a Senior Software Engineer on the Chaos Engineering team at Netflix where she works on ensuring that Netflix remains resilient in the face of uncertain conditions. She is also a student of Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University. She is passionate about resilient software, people, and the intersection of those two worlds. She recently keynoted at AWS re:Invent to an audience of ~40,000 people about the benefits and business case behind implementing Chaos Engineering. Prior to Netflix Nora founded and led the Developer Productivity team at Jet.com.

Nathan Aschbacher is currently CEO of Auxon Corporation. He began his career writing programs for CNC machines where overlooked edge cases resulted in mangled heaps of metal, broken tool bits, and lasting impressions of catastrophic failure. Over the many years since, Nathan has designed fault-tolerant, highly-available, and high-assurance systems for distributed data platforms, machine learning, and global payment processing. Nathan first applied Chaos Engineering principles to problems in the FinTech space, transferred the practice to autonomous vehicle development, and now explores the marriage of formal methods and Chaos Engineering for verifying and validating the resiliency of complex, highly-automated safety-critical systems in a number of different domains (e.g., automotive, industrial automation, and aerospace).