Cloudy with a Chance of Chaos - Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign: What Five Man Electrical Band and Todd Conklin Taught Me about Chaos Engineering
GOTOpia Chaos Engineering Day 2021

Thursday Feb 18
15:10 –
16:10
Room 1

Cloudy with a Chance of Chaos - Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign: What Five Man Electrical Band and Todd Conklin Taught Me about Chaos Engineering



15:10pm - 15:30pm

CHRISTINA YAKOMIN: Cloudy with a Chance of Chaos

Weather alert!!

Vanguard's Chaos and Resilience Engineering team has implemented a home-grown Chaos Engineering platform, "The Climate of Chaos", featuring self-service experiments with meteorology-themed names like Cyclone, Tornado, and Blizzard.

In this session, we'll break down the fundamentals of chaos engineering, the value of the practice, and why we decided to build our own platform from scratch, rather than leveraging a vendor product or an open source library. We'll also get into the details of our architecture, our client engagement model, our risk management strategy, and our integrated observability and reporting tooling. By running targeted experiments with our custom tool suite, we have ensured that our systems are ready to weather any storm, no matter how much chaos is in the forecast!

15:30pm - 15:50pm

ANDY FLEENER: Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign: What Five Man Electrical Band and Todd Conklin Taught Me about Chaos Engineering

Signs and Signals are all around us, they influence how we perceive and feel about the systems we interact with on a daily basis. Many of these signals are loud, or strong, a production outage, an angry customer, or a missed deadline. But there’s more to signals than just the ones we see or hear when something goes bang. Actively searching for and understanding Weak Signals is the key to creating the most productive Chaos Experiments. Weak Signals are small, barely noticeable, indications of new emergent behavior in the system. They’re the “tea leaves”, they trigger our gut feelings, and our hunches.

In this talk I will dig into the area of Chaos Engineering that I find most interesting, how do you decide what to experiment on?

15.50pm - 16.10 Q&A