Chaos Monkey

Chaos Monkey –

Many ask,     “Hey, what’s the big deal?     After all,   it’s just a monkey.     A monkey in the wires.”
“What’s a monkey   in the wires   ever done to you,   anyway?”   they ask.     That seems so reasonable.
“After all,”   they ask soothingly,   “what could only   one   monkey   in the wires do,   even if it did decide   to eat some things?”
“And,   what is all this worry about   a few monkeys   who just want to   hang out   together   in the wires?”       That, too, seems   to be a   simple and reasonable query.
But,   as with many things,   it is not the players   but the   audience   that is the issue.
And,   as with many things,   it   ..only   ….takes   ……One.
It   ..only   ….takes   ……One   to initiate   Chaos Monkey.
Chaos Monkey is coming.       For you.

* * * * * * *

The term Chaos Monkey was popularized by the systems development team at Netflix.

As with many services, products and things you use every day, the Netflix system is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a system of cloud platforms and services that enable quick and scalable deployment of products and services.

One of the very first things the Netflix  team created was a computer program that purposefully, constantly and randomly crashed their other services (programs) they had running on AWS. By doing so, they were forced to build resilient, recoverable systems.

When AWS has outages, one of the only major systems that usually stays up and available is Netflix. Their systems are resilient because they have Chaos Monkey running around inside their systems.

Netflix has released the Chaos Monkey code into the public domain.

Learn more here: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html