Chaos Engineering Vocabulary
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Exercise 1 of 5
The SRE explains: 'We ran a game day last week — injected latency into the payment service and checked if our circuit breakers fired correctly.'
What is a game day in the context of reliability engineering?
A game day is a planned event where teams deliberately inject failures to validate that systems and runbooks behave as expected.
Exercise 2 of 5
The engineer says: 'We follow the hypothesis-driven approach — define the steady state, inject failure, observe, and conclude.'
What is 'steady state' in chaos engineering?
Steady state is the baseline of normal system behavior (e.g., p99 latency < 200ms, error rate < 0.1%). Chaos experiments verify the system returns to steady state after failure.
Exercise 3 of 5
The platform lead says: 'We use fault injection at the network level — drop packets between services and see if retries and timeouts handle it gracefully.'
What is fault injection?
Fault injection deliberately introduces failures (latency, packet loss, process crashes) to observe how a system handles them.
Exercise 4 of 5
The team decides: 'Let's start with a blast radius of one pod in staging before we touch production.'
What does 'blast radius' mean in chaos engineering?
Blast radius refers to how much of the system is affected by a chaos experiment or real failure — smaller is safer when starting out.
Exercise 5 of 5
The SRE says: 'We integrated Chaos Monkey into our CI pipeline — it randomly terminates instances to ensure we have no single points of failure.'
What was Chaos Monkey originally designed to test?
Chaos Monkey, created by Netflix, randomly terminates cloud instances to verify that services can survive unexpected host failures.