Applying the principles of chaos to serverless

Chaos engineering is a discipline that focuses on improving system resilience through controlled experiments that expose the inherent chaos and failure modes in your system. While most of the publicized literature and tools focus on killing EC2 servers, Yan Cui explains how to apply the same principles of chaos to a serverless architecture built around AWS Lambda functions.

Chaos engineering is a discipline that focuses on improving system resilience through controlled experiments that expose the inherent chaos and failure modes in your system, before these failure modes manifest themselves like a wildfire in production and impact your users. (Netflix is undoubtedly the leader in this field.) However, much of the publicized tools and articles about chaos engineering focus on killing EC2 instances, and efforts to implement chaos engineering in the serverless community have been largely limited to moving those tools into AWS Lambda functions. But how can we apply the same principles of chaos to a serverless architecture built around AWS Lambda functions? Serverless architectures have more inherent chaos and complexity than their serverful counterparts, and you have less control over their runtime behavior. In short, there are far more unknown unknowns with these systems. So can we adapt existing practices to expose the inherent chaos in these systems? If so, what are the limitations and new challenges that we need to consider? Join Yan Cui to learn how to apply the principles of chaos to a serverless architecture.