Integrate resiliency testing as part of your deployment

Integrating resiliency testing during the deployment process ensures that controlled changes can be made without introducing unforeseen disruptions. This approach allows teams to validate the resilience of their system against potential failures and maintain application availability even during updates or changes.

Best Practices

Implement Automated Resiliency Testing in CI/CD Pipeline

• Integrate chaos engineering principles into your automated deployment process to expose system weaknesses.
• Use tools like Chaos Monkey or Gremlin to simulate failures and test system response under adverse conditions.
• Run resiliency tests in a controlled pre-production environment to avoid impacting production workloads while assessing system stability.
• Analyze test results to identify systemic weaknesses and improve system design and architecture.
• Document findings and incorporate lessons learned into future deployment planning, ensuring a continuous improvement process.

Questions to ask your team

• How frequently do you run resiliency tests in your deployment pipeline?
• What types of chaos engineering experiments have you implemented?
• How do you determine the impact of failures on your workloads during resiliency testing?
• Can you provide examples of changes made as a result of insights gained from your resiliency tests?
• What tools or frameworks are you using to automate your resiliency testing?
• How do you ensure that your team is trained and equipped to conduct these tests effectively?
• What metrics do you track to evaluate the success of your resiliency testing?
• How are failures during resiliency testing communicated and addressed in your deployment process?

Who should be doing this?

DevOps Engineer

• Design and implement automated deployment pipelines that include resiliency testing.
• Integrate chaos engineering principles into the deployment process.
• Monitor and report on the outcomes of resiliency tests during pre-production deployments.

Quality Assurance Engineer

• Develop and execute test plans that incorporate resiliency testing scenarios.
• Identify potential failure points in the infrastructure and application components.
• Collaborate with developers to ensure code changes do not negatively impact system reliability.

Site Reliability Engineer

• Ensure systems are built to handle failures gracefully.
• Implement monitoring and alerting to track the impact of changes on system reliability.
• Facilitate post-mortem analyses to learn from resiliency testing outcomes.

Project Manager

• Coordinate the efforts of various teams involved in implementing resiliency testing.
• Manage timelines and deliverables related to the deployment process.
• Communicate with stakeholders regarding the goals and results of the resiliency tests.

Software Developer

• Write code that adheres to best practices for reliability and resiliency.
• Collaborate with DevOps and QA teams to ensure that changes are deployable and tested adequately.
• Participate in troubleshooting issues identified during resiliency testing.

What evidence shows this is happening in your organization?

• Resiliency Testing Playbook: A comprehensive playbook that outlines the process for integrating resiliency testing into the deployment pipeline, including guidelines on using chaos engineering techniques to validate system robustness in pre-production environments.
• Automated Deployment Pipeline Diagram: A visual representation of the automated deployment pipeline, illustrating the integration points for resiliency tests, with clear steps indicating where chaos engineering principles are applied.
• Change Management Policy: A formal policy document that outlines how controlled changes are managed within the organization, emphasizing the importance of resiliency testing before production releases.
• Resiliency Test Checklist: A detailed checklist that teams must complete before deploying changes, ensuring all required resiliency tests using chaos engineering techniques are executed and documented.
• Weekly Resiliency Testing Report: A report that summarizes the outcomes of resiliency tests performed during the week, including metrics on system performance, observed issues, and recommendations for improvement.

Cloud Services

AWS

• AWS Fault Injection Simulator: Allows you to carry out chaos engineering experiments to identify weaknesses in your application, helping ensure reliability by improving the system’s resilience to unexpected failures.
• AWS CloudFormation: Enables you to manage and provision your infrastructure as code, making it easy to deploy consistent environments that include resiliency testing setups.
• AWS CodePipeline: Automates your continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, and allows integration of automated testing, including resiliency tests within your deployment process.

Azure

• Azure Chaos Studio: Enables you to experiment with your applications by simulating failures to improve application reliability and resilience.
• Azure Resource Manager: Provides a management layer that simplifies the process of deploying and managing Azure resources, including integration of testing and monitoring for resiliency.
• Azure DevOps: Offers comprehensive tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery, including features to implement resiliency testing and manage deployments effectively.

Google Cloud Platform

• Google Cloud Chaos Engineering: Provides tools and practices to simulate failures in your system, enabling you to test resiliency and improve the reliability of your applications.
• Google Cloud Deployment Manager: Allows you to create, manage, and deploy cloud resources with templates, facilitating the incorporation of testing and resiliency practices in deployment.
• Google Cloud Build: A CI/CD platform that automates the creation of inclusive build and test environments, allowing integration of resiliency tests during the deployment process.

Question: How do you implement change?
Pillar: Reliability (Code: REL)