Elevating Chaos Engineering Experiments to the Next Level

Steadybit's new experiment features aim to address the complexities of real-world distributed systems by allowing users to simulate various challenging scenarios, such as DNS failures, network slowdowns, and container outages. Utilizing a simple DNS failure experiment via their online shopping demo application, the blog post demonstrates the process of setting up and executing these experiments using Steadybit's dashboard and experiment editor. The simulation reveals a weak spot in the system when the DNS cache is unavailable, highlighting the potential for erroneous HTTP responses due to the tight coupling of microservices. The blog post underscores the importance of identifying system vulnerabilities through complex experiments and suggests architectural improvements, such as implementing eventual consistency and caches, to enhance system reliability. Future posts will explore additional features and integrations with monitoring solutions like Instana and Prometheus.