What The Hack - ChaosStudio4AKS

Introduction

Azure Chaos Studio (Preview) is a managed service for improving resilience by injecting faults into your Azure applications. Running controlled fault injection experiments against your applications, a practice known as chaos engineering, helps you to measure, understand, and improve resilience against real-world incidents, such as a region outages or application failures causing high CPU utilization on a VMs, Scale Sets, and Azure Kubernetes.

Learning Objectives

This “What the Hack” WTH is designed to introduce you to Azure Chaos Studio (Preview) and guide you through a series of hands-on challenges to accomplish the following:

• Leverage the Azure Chaos Studio to inject failure into an application/workload
• Provide hands-on understanding of Chaos Engineering
• Understand how resiliency can be achieved with Azure

In this WTH, you are the system owner of the Contoso Pizzeria Application (or you may bring your own application). Super Bowl Sunday is Contoso Pizza’s busiest time of the year, the pizzeria ordering application must be available during the Super Bowl.

You have been tasked to test the resiliency of the pizzeria application (or your application). The pizzeria application is running on Azure and you will use Chaos Studio to simulate various failures.

Challenges

• Challenge 00: Prerequisites - Ready, Set, GO!
  • Deploy the multi-region Kubernetes pizzeria application
• Challenge 01: Is your application ready for the Super Bowl?
  • How does your application handle failure during large scale events?
• Challenge 02: My AZ burned down, now what?
  • Can your application survive an Azure outage of 1 or more Availability Zones?
• Challenge 03: Godzilla takes out an Azure region!
  • Can your application survive a region failure?
• Challenge 04: Injecting Chaos into your CI/CD pipeline
  • Optional challenge, using Chaos Studio experiments in your CI/CD pipeline

Prerequisites

• Azure subscription with contributor access
• Visual Studio Code terminal or Azure Shell (recommended)
• Latest Azure CLI (if not using Azure Shell)
• GitHub or Azure DevOps to automate Chaos Testing
• Azure fundamentals, Vnets, NSGs, Scale Sets, Traffic Manager
• Fundamentals of Chaos Engineering
• Intermediate understanding of Kubernetes (kubectl commands)and AKS

Learning Resources

• What is Azure Chaos Studio
• What is Chaos Engineering
• How Netflix pioneered Chaos Engineering
• Embrace the Chaos
• Why you should break more things on purpose –AWS, Azure, and LinkedIn case studies

Contributors

• Jerry Rhoads
• Kevin Gates
• Andy Huang
• Tommy Falgout