August 2020 Summaries

Gremlin has announced a new feature that allows organizations to share Scenarios, facilitating the creation of a library of reliability exercises tailored to their specific applications and technology. These shared Scenarios enable users to create templated Chaos Experiments that can be accessed and customized by co-workers to identify and address reliability gaps. This feature is particularly beneficial for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) who need to onboard new engineers into Chaos Engineering by providing them with pre-defined templates to validate alerts and test resilience. Shared Scenarios can also be used to replicate incidents to ensure fixes are effective and to prepare applications for production by demonstrating reliability through regular testing. The feature supports a culture of reliability by allowing teams to easily access and run these Scenarios, thus promoting continuous learning and improvement across the organization. Users can share completed Scenarios with their company, maintaining elements such as blast radius and health checks, while team managers and users have control over sharing and customizing the templates.

Following significant outages in the UK finance industry, the Bank of England, Prudential Regulation Authority, and Financial Conduct Authority introduced a framework to enhance operational resilience, which any company can adopt to bolster their software systems. The framework involves identifying critical business services, setting acceptable outage tolerance levels, and testing the firm's ability to maintain these levels through realistic scenarios, with management involvement in decision-making and continuous improvement efforts. Chaos Engineering methods are recommended for testing, enabling companies to simulate failure scenarios and identify hidden dependencies in their systems. The proposal emphasizes the importance of involving senior management in setting impact tolerance levels, prioritizing infrastructure improvements, and ensuring robust communication strategies. While initially aimed at UK institutions, the guidelines reflect best practices in the tech industry and offer valuable insights for global companies seeking to improve system resilience.