How your business could learn from Chaos Monkey

We live in a world that’s obsessed with the cloud and hosting almost everything it possibly can on it. It’s new, it’s easy to access, almost anyone can do it and it’s cheap. Unfortunately with everyone jumping on the bandwagon it’s starting to show its cracks, and many businesses aren’t building their web applications the right way or even considering the new ways their applications could fail. A while ago, Netflix released a tool for Amazon EC2 called ‘Chaos Monkey’ which is not only one of the best tools ever thought up, it’s also every administrator’s worst nightmare. You see, Chaos Monkey is a tool that randomly kills instances and other services in order to test failure. In a post titled “5 lessons we’ve learned from using AWS” from 2010, Amazon details the hard lessons it learnt in the cloud. Whilst this is a very old post, it’s also extremely relevant even now as more businesses wade their way into the cloud. This part is particularly unsettling for the engineers among us: “One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most â€" in the event of an unexpected outage.” If you’re in infrastructure and that doesn’t give