Chaos Conf Q&A: Adrian Cockcroft & Yury Niño Roa

Source:-infoq

In preparation for the upcoming Chaos Conf 2020, InfoQ sat down with Adrian Cockcroft and Yury Niño Roa to explore topics of interest in the chaos engineering community. Key takeaways included: the adoption of chaos engineering is still unevenly spread across organisations; there are clear benefits with running “game days” to develop psychological safety; and the future of chaos engineering points toward incorporating experiments focused on security and scaling up experiments to test larger failure modes.

Cockcroft, VP cloud architecture strategy at AWS, and Niño Roa, senior site reliability engineer at ADL Digital Lab, are both speaking at Chaos Conf 2020. This is a free virtual event running 6-8 October, organised by the Gremlin team, that will focus on the chaos engineering community. InfoQ was keen to explore several of the key themes of the event, such as reliability and “completing the DevOps loop”.

Although the use of game days is not a new practice, both interviewees highlighted the benefits of practicing incident management and remediation in a safe to fail environment. As Google has discussed previously, the concept of “psychological safety” is vitally important to creating high-performing teams. When dealing with production incidents and acting under duress, this concept is even more important.

Implementing observability in both the platform and application stacks is essential for capturing feedback for the operations and development teams. DevOps practices aim to assist in the removal of silos separating developers and operations engineers. However, the Chaos Conf team suggests that “too often it creates a one-way flow from developers to ops with no feedback from ops to help developers build more operable and reliable applications.”

Increasing automation and bringing developers and operations engineers together with chaos engineering can help to increase the fidelity and usefulness of metrics that were collected for the purpose feedback.

Below is an edited version of the discussion between InfoQ, Niño Roa, and Cockcroft.