October 2018 Summaries

Charity Majors, founder and CEO of Honeycomb.io, discussed the evolving landscape of software development and the importance of observability at Chaos Conf 2018. Majors critiqued the traditional software development cycle, highlighting the inadequacy of conventional monitoring systems in managing the complexity and unpredictability of modern distributed systems. She emphasized the need for observability, which allows engineers to understand the internal workings of a system by asking questions through existing tools without deploying new code. This shift from monitoring to observability is crucial for effective Chaos Engineering, allowing engineers to prepare for unknown challenges. Majors argued that operational literacy is essential for engineers, as real-world conditions, rather than controlled environments, provide the most reliable insights into system behavior. Observability facilitates this by moving beyond static dashboards and embracing a more dynamic, first-person perspective that enables engineers to explore and resolve issues based on real-time data.

In October 2018, a significant event in the Chaos Engineering community was the inaugural Chaos Conf held in San Francisco, organized by Gremlin to foster discussions and knowledge-sharing about Chaos Engineering. The conference featured a single-day, one-track format with world-class speakers from leading technology companies like AWS, Walmart Labs, and Twitter, who shared insights on topics such as distributed systems, observability, and proactive failure testing. Notable speakers included Adrian Cockroft, who opened the event with a keynote, and others who emphasized the importance of testing system failures to ensure application resilience and uptime. The event was successfully orchestrated by Dina, a one-woman events team, and the venue, Alamo Drafthouse, provided an engaging backdrop for the diverse international audience. Additionally, the conference highlighted the importance of community engagement, offering video recordings and transcripts of the talks for wider accessibility, and encouraged participation in the Chaos Engineering Community on platforms like Slack. Gremlin also announced new features such as Application Level Fault Injection (ALFI) for DevOps teams to target attacks more precisely, underscoring the ongoing evolution and importance of Chaos Engineering in enhancing system reliability.