20 Chaos Engineering Interview Questions and Answers

Chaos engineering is the practice of intentionally injecting faults into a system to test its resilience. As a relatively new field, there are not yet many established best practices. This means that interviewers may ask questions to gauge your understanding of chaos engineering principles and how they can be applied to real-world scenarios. In this article, we review some common chaos engineering interview questions and provide guidance on how to answer them.

Chaos Engineering Interview Questions and Answers

Here are 20 commonly asked Chaos Engineering interview questions and answers to prepare you for your interview:

1. What is Chaos Engineering?

Chaos engineering is the practice of deliberately introducing chaos into a system in order to test its resilience. By doing so, you can identify potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities in your system before they are exploited by real-world attackers.

2. What are the principles of chaos engineering?

The principles of chaos engineering are:

1. Identify potential failure points in your system.
2. Create experiments to test how your system responds to failures.
3. Run those experiments in your production environment.
4. Learn from the results of the experiments and use that knowledge to improve your system.

3. What is the difference between fault tolerance and resiliency?

Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue operating properly in the event of a failure. Resiliency is the ability of a system to recover from a failure.

4. Can you explain what a hypothesis is in the context of chaos engineering?

A hypothesis in chaos engineering is a proposed explanation for how a system might fail. This explanation is then tested by deliberately introducing faults into the system to see if they can indeed cause the system to fail in the way that is predicted by the hypothesis. If the hypothesis is correct, then the chaos engineering experiment can help to identify potential weaknesses in the system so that they can be addressed before a real-world incident occurs.

5. Can you give me some examples of real-world applications that use chaos engineering?

Chaos engineering is used in a variety of industries in order to test systems for resilience. For example, it has been used by Netflix in order to test their streaming service against unexpected failures, and by Google to test the reliability of their search engine.

6. Is it possible to inject failures into different layers of an application? If yes, then how?

Yes, it is possible to inject failures into different layers of an application. One way to do this is to use a tool like Chaos Toolkit. This tool allows you to inject failures into your application in a controlled and safe manner so that you can test how your application responds to different types of failures.

7. Is it possible to simulate attacks on a system using chaos engineering? If yes, then can you give me some examples?

Yes, it is possible to simulate attacks on a system using chaos engineering. For example, you could simulate a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by flooding the system with requests from multiple computers. Another example would be to simulate a data breach by injecting malicious code into the system that would allow unauthorized access to sensitive data.

8. How do you perform chaos engineering safely without crashing your entire system?

The first step is to identify what your system’s critical components are. Once you’ve identified these components, you can begin to experiment with different ways of disrupting them. It’s important to start small and gradually increase the scope and severity of the disruptions you’re causing. You also need to have a plan in place for how to quickly recover from any failures that do occur. Finally, it’s important to constantly monitor your system while you’re performing chaos engineering so that you can identify any potential issues as quickly as possible.

9. What are the most common types of failures simulated when performing chaos engineering?

The most common types of failures simulated when performing chaos engineering are network failures, system failures, and application failures.

10. Are there any tools available for performing chaos engineering?

Yes, there are a few tools available for performing chaos engineering. Some of these tools include Gremlin, Chaos Toolkit, and Netflix’s Chaos Monkey.

11. What are the stages involved in creating a chaos engineering experiment?

There are four stages involved in creating a chaos engineering experiment:

1. Define the system under test
2. Identify potential failure points
3. Select and implement chaos experiments
4. Analyze results and improve system resilience

In the first stage, you will need to identify what system or component you want to test. In the second stage, you will identify potential failure points within that system. In the third stage, you will select and implement chaos experiments that will deliberately cause those failures. In the fourth stage, you will analyze the results of the experiments and use what you’ve learned to improve the resilience of the system.

12. What are the main benefits of performing chaos engineering?

The main benefits of chaos engineering are that it can help identify potential weaknesses in a system before they are exploited, and it can help build confidence in a system’s ability to withstand unexpected events.

13. Can you name some popular tech companies that have used chaos engineering?

Yes. Some popular tech companies that have used chaos engineering include Netflix, Amazon, and Google.

14. What kind of problems can be solved by performing chaos engineering?

Chaos engineering can be used to solve a variety of problems, including those related to system availability, resilience, and performance. By deliberately introducing chaos into a system, engineers can identify and fix potential issues before they cause major problems.

15. What’s the best way to define error budgets?

Error budgets are a way of quantifying the amount of risk that a company is willing to take on in order to deliver a new feature or service. They help to ensure that new features do not introduce too much risk and that the company is able to learn from and recover from any errors that do occur.

The best way to define error budgets will vary from company to company, but there are a few key factors to consider. First, you need to decide how much risk you are willing to take on. This will depend on the size of your company, the complexity of your system, and your tolerance for outages. Second, you need to decide how you will measure risk. This can be done using a variety of metrics, such as the number of customer complaints, the amount of time your system is down, or the number of errors that are logged. Finally, you need to set a budget for how much you are willing to spend on fixing errors. This budget should be based on the cost of the errors and the expected revenue from the new feature or service.

16. What are the differences between load testing and chaos engineering?

Load testing is a process of putting stress on a system in order to see how it performs. This is usually done by simulating real-world usage scenarios. Chaos engineering is a process of deliberately introducing faults into a system in order to test its resilience. This can help to identify potential weaknesses in a system before they are exploited in a real-world scenario.

17. What does Netflix mean by “Chaos Monkey”?

The Chaos Monkey is a tool that Netflix uses to randomly kill processes and services in their production environment in order to test the system’s resilience. By doing this, they are able to find and fix potential issues before they cause any customer-facing problems.

18. How does game days differ from traditional disaster recovery exercises?

There are a few key ways in which game days differ from traditional disaster recovery exercises. For one, game days are typically much more structured and have specific goals in mind, whereas disaster recovery exercises can be more open-ended. Additionally, game days usually involve a wider range of people and teams in order to simulate a more realistic disaster scenario. Finally, game days often make use of automation and tooling to help with the execution of the exercise.

19. Why would you want to perform chaos engineering instead of just waiting for a disaster to happen?

The goal of chaos engineering is to find weaknesses in systems before they are actually put under stress. By deliberately causing small failures in a controlled environment, you can learn how your system responds and identify potential problems. This way, you can fix the problems before they cause a major outage.

20. Can you explain what a failure injection framework is?

A failure injection framework is a tool that helps you to test your system’s resilience to failure by deliberately injecting faults into your system. This can help you to identify potential weaknesses in your system so that you can address them before they cause a real problem.