By Inapps.net
Chaos Engineering as a Feature
In addition to AWS and Azure offering chaos engineering as part of their cloud offerings, other vendors are including chaos engineering tools as part of their service portfolios.
LaunchDarkly, for example, is a feature engineering platform that can be a useful tool in chaos engineering practices. It allows companies deploying software updates to release them in a granular way, starting with small sets of users, allowing teams to quickly roll their updates back if something doesn’t work.
LaunchDarkly counts 22 of the Fortune 100 among its customers, including NBC, GoDaddy, Toyota, Meetup, Adidas, and IBM.
Despite its growing popularity, chaos engineering carries risks, especially when tests are being carried out in production environments, noted Heidi Waterhouse, transformation advocate at LaunchDarkly.
“People say, ‘I don’t want to lose money because production is down,’” she said. “But you’re already testing in production — you’re just not aware of it.”
Real-world chaos engineering happens all the time. Things break, and they break in uncontrolled ways — with potentially disastrous consequences.
“If you think about it, ransomware is someone else performing a chaos engineering experiment on your infrastructure non-consensually,” Waterhouse said. “We give you the tools to do that kind of testing in production safely, in a way that’s instantly reversible and auditable, so you can make sure it’s not as scary.”
Forrester Consulting recently did a survey on behalf of LaunchDarkly about the total economic impact of its platform, focusing specifically on the ability to turn individual software features on or off for customer subsets. The return on investment of the platform was 245%, due to reduced cost of the pre-production environment, developer productivity savings, and avoided costs of maintaining a homegrown feature management system.
“I look at chaos engineering as a very aggressive form of performance testing at the end of the software delivery cycle,” said Jason English, principal analyst at Intellyx.
The industry is going through a “shift left” process, where more of the testing work happens at the start of the development process. But there’s also a “shift right,” he said: “The development cycle is getting so short that testing is also shifting right — into production.”
And the effectiveness of chaos engineering is helping it expand from where it started out, with web-native companies like Netflix, to more established enterprises, English said.
“You see larger companies, even highly regulated companies, realizing that this is part of an overall compliance check,” he said.
More vendors are offering chaos engineering, under a variety of names, and more will probably do so in the future.
“Any major or minor testing firm that’s doing non-functional testing is doing some form of chaos engineering by default, though they might not call it that,” he said.
NS1, for example, an application traffic management company, has a tool for stress testing DNS servers and networks. The company released it as an open source project called Flamethrower in 2019.
