Chaos Testing

Noun · Development

Definitions

  1. Deliberately injecting failures (network partitions, server crashes, disk full, clock skew, high latency) into a system to verify it handles them gracefully. Goes beyond unit and integration tests by testing failure modes in realistic conditions. Tools: Chaos Monkey (random kills), Litmus (Kubernetes), Gremlin (platform), and tc (network simulation).

    In plain English: Intentionally breaking things in your system to find out what happens, so you can fix weaknesses before they cause real outages.

    Example: "The chaos test injected 500ms latency between services — we discovered the checkout flow had no timeout and would hang indefinitely."

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