Comparison
Chaos engineeringvsGame day
Chaos engineering
you deliberately kill an instance in production during working hours to find out whether the failover actually works.
Injecting controlled failures into a running system to verify that its resilience mechanisms work before an incident tests them. The value is in disproving assumptions: the retry that was never exercised, the replica that was never promoted. Doing it without a hypothesis, a blast radius limit and a stop button is not chaos engineering, it is an outage.
Full entry →Game day
you broke the database on purpose during working hours to find out whether the failover worked.
A scheduled exercise where a failure is deliberately induced to test the system and the people around it. Its main product is usually not the technical finding but the procedural one: the runbook was wrong, the alert went to a former employee, nobody knew who could authorise the failover. Running one is the only reliable way to find latent failures before they find you.
Full entry →