5 of our books and 2 talks define this term — and their definitions are worth reading side by side.
IT systems have grown so complex that it is often difficult to even imagine what can go wrong or what the consequences of different unexpected circumstances will be. Chaos Engineering is a new discipline in the IT world that tries to make systems fail in unexpected ways, both to build confidence in their resilience and to help improve it. In 2011 Netflix released to the broader community something called Chaos Monkey—a script that deliberately caused random servers to crash. If a system is well-engineered by today’s standards, it should patch itself up and continue operating despite the crash. As crazy as it sounds, the only way to test the consequences of a failure in live operational systems is to make the failure actually occur and watch what happens. Chaos Engineering is based on this pioneering work and explores the unpredictable effects that may follow when something goes wrong in an IT system.
— War and Peace and IT: Glossary, Mark Schwartz
Chaos Engineering, injecting deliberate failure into a production environment
— Sooner Safer Happier, in “Chapter 7: Continuous Attention to Technical Excellence”, Jonathan Smart
a new discipline called chaos engineering is emerging, pioneered by the Netflix engineers. Their idea was to simulate major failures in live systems to make certain such failures are gracefully handled.
— War and Peace and IT, in “2 - COMPLEXITY AND UNCERTAINTY”, Mark Schwartz
One technique is chaos engineering, or purposely attacking pieces of your organization to test its resiliency and adaptability.
— The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy Reader's Guide, in the text, IT Revolution
Chaos engineering is the disciplined practice of intentionally injecting faults or failures into a system to test its resilience and uncover weaknesses before they manifest in production.
— Unclogging the Drain, in the text
chaos engineering essentially is the idea of proactively introducing the conditions by which you expect the system to operate, to verify that — under turbulent conditions or under adverse conditions in the system environment — that your system can actually respond
— Aaron Rinehart · Introducing Latency Squeeze Injection (LSI), the Next Generation of Resilience at Capital One, Las Vegas 2024 · at 2:59
chaos engineering is this discipline of intentional disruption to your applications, inducing intentional disruptions
— Gnani Daththreya, Sathiya Shunmugasundaram · Continuous Chaos in DevOps, San Francisco 2017 · at 9:18