Appendix B. The Chaos Toolkit Community Playground

So, you’ve read this book and started your journey toward mastering chaos engineering. You’ve played with the included samples and seen how chaos experiments and Game Days can surface evidence of system weaknesses so that you can then prioritize what weaknesses should be learned from and addressed before they affect your users. It’s a great start!

The next step might be more challenging. Before you start running your own Game Days and chaos experiments against your own systems you might want to practice a bit more. You might want to see others’ experiments, and even how other systems have evolved in response to evidence of weaknesses. While nothing beats exploring a real system (sandbox or production) to learn about the evidence and insights that chaos engineering can provide, when you are taking your first steps it can be really helpful to work against smaller, simplified, safe systems while you get into the practice.

That is what the Chaos Toolkit Community Playground is all about.

The Chaos Toolkit community has created the Community Playground as an open source and free project where you can explore different types of systems and accompanying chaos experiments. Each sample system in the playground includes a history through which you can see where an experiment has resulted in fundamental system improvements. This gives you a view of how chaos engineering can be used over time to surface evidence of weaknesses and then to validate that those weaknesses have been overcome in various deployments.

You already worked with the playground in exploring the sample code for this book. That code is continually evolving with new experiments and new strategies for overcoming system weaknesses. The Community Playground, where you can work with these experiments and systems alongside the rest of the community, is the best place to hone your chaos engineering skills. It’s a safe place for you to take your own chaos engineering to the next level and share that experience with others.

You can also sign up for the chaostoolkit Slack channel, where the different sample applications and accompanying experiments in the Community Playground are discussed and maintained. Chaos engineering is a powerful discipline and practice, and the Chaos Toolkit Community Playground is the place for you to take the skills you’ve learned in this book to the next level.

On behalf of the entire Chaos Toolkit community, we look forward to seeing you there!