Why developers are turning to chaos engineering

As an IT professional, you want order—and sometimes you may have to turn to chaos for it.

Chaos engineering uses a plethora of tests to determine the strength of a system and to uncover vulnerabilities. First developed by Netflix in 2011 to test its streaming capabilities, chaos engineering is used by large companies like Facebook and Microsoft to probe weak spots in their platforms.

Now, the security testing technique could be more accessible to smaller developers. That’s according to German startup Steadybit, which recently raised $7.8 million in a funding round aimed at expanding its chaos and reliability engineering platform to the public.

Benjamin Wilms, Steadybit co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that the company wants to provide tools to integrate chaos engineering tests into the development process, part of a push to expand the use of the technology.

“Developers are haunted by incident after incident and under tremendous pressure,” Wilms said. “We’d like to get them into a more proactive approach earlier in the process where they can check and validate their code before it goes into production.”

Increased attention on chaos engineering comes as the technique is being used to ensure smooth user end experience for consumers. IT management company Fiserv’s vice president, Girish Narasimha Raghavan, told CXOToday that the need for such services is increasing.

“There is little tolerance for suboptimal experiences, and an inability to meet customer expectations can lead to significant customer attrition and negative business impact,” Raghavan said. “Preventing software failures before they have an impact on customers is therefore a business necessity.”—EH

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