Ask HN: When does it make sense to have a chaos monkey?

1 points by cirwin 12y ago ↗ HN

I've read about companies having chaos monkeys to check that failed machines don't take your site down. When do they typically start doing that? It doesn't seem to make sense at our scale.

1 comment

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erbdex 12y ago ↗

The 'size' at which you unleash the chaos-monkey is i think a matter of a lot of subjectivity. The QoS expected is one factor. Can you afford to fail?

Formally, two 'requirements', in order to randomly kill your servers are-

  1. You have Highly Available infrastructure.
  2. You have fail-over established across the architecture.