Ever since the Netflix Eng Tools team created Chaos Monkey more than 10 years, one thing has remained a constant – distributed cloud architectures, and therefore the web, have continued to grow increasingly more complex. A lot has changed these past 12 years, but a lot has remained the same. To learn more about advancements in chaos engineering, we talked with Benjamin Wilms, co-founder and CEO of Steadybit, a company that just introduced the general availability of their chaos and reliability engineering platform.
VMblog: What is chaos engineering and why is Steadybit working to go beyond it?
Benjamin Wilms: Chaos engineering is a method of experimenting on a system to build confidence in that system’s ability to withstand potential disruptions. By introducing failure and faulty scenarios developers can see how systems respond in unpredictable ways and what makes them break under pressure. This allows chaos engineers to ask, “Why?”. At Steadybit, We want to move beyond chaos engineering; we want to create holistic reliability engineering solutions that address the real issues of building a culture of resilience and empowering everybody who builds and runs software systems.
VMblog: What does a culture of resilience mean to you and why is it important?
Wilms: For us, improving the resilience of complex software systems is just the beginning. No matter how good your tools are, if we as a team are not collaborating and discussing, that tool is not going to be successful. The knowledge that exists in people’s heads must be made accessible to others.
By looking at resilience as a team sport, anyone and everyone will be able to have a hand in cultivating the capability to cope with difficulties and overcome adversity.
VMblog: How is Steadybit different from other chaos engineering platforms?
Wilms: Often, chaos engineering is only implemented in later stages of the software dev cycle or even when a failure occurs, leading to cascading effects that could be avoided. Steadybit provides an answer for that. We make any existing reliability issues transparent at an early stage and accompany the developer during the solution. The goal is always to create as little or no further cognitive load for the developer but to give them the focus on his actual task: Velocity – The implementation of features. By applying Steadybit you can easily roll it out in a secure and non-intrusive way. Moving from experiments to expectations means that many complicated facets of Chaos Engineering can be avoided, and Resilience Engineering be democratized. Expert knowledge is now no longer required to operate systems with stability and reliability.
VMblog: Who is Steadybit for and how does it work?
Wilms: Because resilience is a shared responsibility, we developed Steadybit as the chaos engineering platform that’s easy to use for everyone, even non-experts. One thing all organizations investing in resilience have in common are expectations, and developers need to be able to encode and evolve them, and optionally share and enforce them on a per-service or an organizational level. The Steadybit platform is built to manage the unpredictable nature of multi-cloud environments, multi-region application architecture, and the numerous microservices running inside. We can define applications’ steady-states by integrating existing load tests and monitoring tools, inject failure modes, and check for resilience best practices by applying resilience policies. We provide visibility into your systems to proactively identify resilience issues and reduce downtime. We follow the principles of chaos engineering and help you stay in control of your chaos experiments.
VMblog: How has chaos testing/chaos engineering changed over the past few years and where do you think it’s going?
Wilms: The approach of purposely breaking things was originally seen as radical. However, with the changes we’ve seen over the past few years, being able to adapt to the market faster than the competition is a must, but leaves little time for testing. Chaos Engineering is just the beginning and with it alone, we will not be able to face today’s situations in distributed and complex systems. We need a guide through our complex systems that helps us better assess risk. An overview of the current resilience, vulnerabilities and what impact they can have is necessary to set the right priority. Engineering teams need to consider whether they can roll out new features or invest in stability – a balance between reliability and engineering velocity is key.
VMblog: What’s next for Steadybit?
Wilms: It has been a wild year for our team, and we’re lucky to have supportive advisors and customers behind not only Steadybit but the approach we are taking to revolutionize chaos engineering. We’re very happy to have recently announced general availability of our reliability and chaos engineering platform along with $7.8 million in seed funding led by boldstart ventures. As a company, we seek to solve a rapidly escalating and evolving problem – and we plan to extend Steadybit’s capabilities in impactful ways.
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