Chaos Engineering Skill

Load tests tell you if your service handles traffic. Chaos Engineering tells you if it survives reality — network partitions, disk failures, dependency outages, and clock skew.

When to Activate

• Designing a chaos experiment for a service
• Running a GameDay or resilience review
• Validating that circuit breakers, retries, and fallbacks actually work
• Moving from "we think we're resilient" to "we have evidence"
• Setting up continuous chaos in CI/CD
• Verifying that a new dependency (external API, database, message queue) has correct timeout and fallback handling before go-live
• Preparing a team for an on-call rotation by building evidence that the service degrades gracefully under realistic failure scenarios
• Simulating a database latency spike with Toxiproxy to confirm connection pool exhaustion behavior and alert thresholds

Core Philosophy