Master the vocabulary for designing and describing chaos experiments: hypothesis formulation, blast radius, steady state, fault injection, game day language, and chaos monkey terminology.
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Which sentence uses chaos experiment vocabulary correctly to describe a hypothesis?
A well-formed chaos hypothesis names the steady state in measurable terms, specifies the exact fault to be injected, and states the resilience mechanism expected to compensate. Vague predictions ('probably be fine') are not hypotheses — they cannot be falsified. The blast radius and kill switch are safety controls, not hypothesis content.
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A colleague says: 'Let's limit the blast radius to 5% of traffic.' What are they communicating?
Blast radius control is a safety practice: rather than exposing all users to a potentially disruptive experiment, you route a small percentage of traffic through instances with the fault injected (the experiment group), keeping the rest unaffected (control group). This gives real-world resilience signal at minimal risk. Common mechanisms: percentage-based traffic routing, feature flags, canary deployments.
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What is the correct way to use 'steady state' in a chaos engineering sentence?
Steady state must be verified BEFORE the experiment (baseline), monitored DURING (does it hold?), and verified AFTER (did it recover?). Steady state is always expressed as measurable metrics with specific thresholds — not subjective descriptions like 'servers are stable.' Absence of recent deployments is a precondition for the experiment, not a steady-state definition.
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Which phrase correctly describes the action of introducing a failure in chaos engineering?
'We inject a fault' is the standard chaos engineering phrasing. The sentence should specify: what type of fault (packet loss, latency, error, resource exhaustion), the magnitude (30%), and the exact target (network link between two named services). This precision is important for reproducibility and for correlating observations with the specific fault condition.
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What does 'chaos monkey language' typically refer to in team communication?
Chaos Monkey is Netflix's original tool for randomly terminating EC2 instances to test resilience. The 'Simian Army' extended this to a suite of tools (Latency Monkey, Conformity Monkey, Security Monkey). When practitioners say 'the chaos monkey took down two instances,' they are using the vocabulary of this tooling tradition. Understanding these terms helps when reading Netflix engineering blog posts and chaos engineering literature.