How to Get Started with Chaos Engineering

We all want more time to innovate, to dream, and to make an impact. But unstable applications and fragile architectures rob us of that time. We spend too much of it reacting to outages instead of building stronger systems.

Chaos Engineering, which uses thoughtfully planned experiments to teach us how our systems behave in the face of failure, gives us that time back. Together as a community, we're on a mission to share Chaos Engineering practices so we can all have more time, space, and energy to innovate.

Here are the top 10 ways to get started with Chaos Engineering today. 💥

1. Read some Chaos Engineering Tutorials

Discover how to practice Chaos Engineering on your application infrastructure. Here are the top three tutorials to get started with:

• How to Install and Use Gremlin on Ubuntu 16.04
• How to Install and Use Gremlin with Docker on Ubuntu 16.04
• Automating a Chaos Engineering Environment on AWS with Terraform

2. Join the Chaos Engineering Slack

The Chaos Engineering Slack is a welcoming place to ask questions about Chaos Engineering, Production Engineering, and SRE culture. You can team up with community members to create useful tools, like the Chaos Engineering: Companies, People, Tools and Practices diagram. Or you can simply meet and build relationships with engineers from all over the world who are practicing and learning about Chaos Engineering.

Over the past few months, our Slack community has swelled to over 800 members. We look forward to welcoming you!

3. Get Involved in Chaos Twitch Streaming

Are you wondering what it looks like to practice Chaos Engineering? Follow me on Twitch as I speak live about all things Chaos Engineering. I stream weekly, so there’s always something new.

4. Attend a Chaos Engineering Meetup or Conference Talk

Chaos Engineering meetups have grown to over 2000 members across 20 countries. We’ve been excited to see new meetups popping up in Australia, Japan, Korea, and the USA over the last few months. A massive thank you to the Chaos Engineering Meetup organizers who have generously dedicated their time and energy to growing the Chaos Community. 💚

5. Speak at a Chaos Engineering Meetup

Want to share your own experiences at a meetup? Just reach out to your local organizer or email community@gremlin.com.

6. Attend Chaos Conf

Chaos Conf is the brand new flagship Chaos Engineering conference. Join us for a full day of Chaos Engineering, good food, and drinks on the house.

This one-day, single-track conference will bring together engineers who are all working to build more reliable systems and teams. Come connect with other engineers at the conference and afterwards at the cocktail reception, which will be held at the Alamo Drafthouse’s famous Bear vs. Bull bar.

Buy your tickets for #ChaosConf2018 here. See you in September!

7. Speak about Chaos Engineering at a Conference

If you've already got some Chaos Engineering chops, why not share your wisdom at one of the many well-known engineering conferences that happen every year? Conferences like DevOpsDays, Monitorama, and QCon attract a wide audience of engineers eager to learn about Chaos Engineering.

8. Write a Community Tutorial

We write a lot of our own tutorials, but we love it when others contribute! Christophe Rochefolle, the Director of Operational Excellence at OUI.sncf, wrote a great one: How To Convince Your Boss And Make Them Say Yes To Chaos Engineering.

Reach out to community@gremlin.com to contribute a tutorial.

9. Become a Chaos Champion

Chaos Champions organize community meetups all around the world to help the community thrive. Here are three Chaos Champions from across the world:

Does your city have a Chaos Engineering Meetup? Find out here!

10. Join the CNCF Chaos Engineering Working Group

The CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) facilitates a Chaos Engineering Working Group. You can join the working group on GitHub.

Here's all the contact and meeting info:

• Mailing List
• Slack (#chaosengineering)

• Bi-weekly meeting

  • Zoom (meeting ID: 909610578)
  • Phone: +16465588656 or +14086380968 (US Toll); +18558801246 or +18773690926 (US Toll Free)

Are You Already Doing Chaos Engineering?

How did you get started? Let us know in the comments!