When reading about Chaos Engineering, you’ll likely hear the terms “fault injection” or “failure injection.” As the name suggests, fault injection is a technique for deliberately introducing stress or failure into a system in order to see how the system responds. But what exactly does this mean, and how does this relate to Chaos Engineering?

Chaos engineering has definitely become more popular in the decade or so since Netflix introduced it to the world via its Chaos Monkey service, but it’s far from ubiquitous. However, that will almost certainly change over time as more organizations become familiar with its core concepts, adopt application patterns and infrastructure that can tolerate failure, and understand that an investment in reliability today could save millions of dollars tomorrow.

Chaos Engineering is one of the hottest new approaches in DevOps. Netflix first pioneered it back in 2008, and since then it’s been adopted by thousands of companies, from the biggest names in tech to small software companies. In our age of highly distributed cloud-based systems, Chaos Engineering promotes resilient system architectures by applying scientific principles. In this article, I’ll explain exactly what Chaos Engineering is and how you can make it work for your team.