Chaos Engineering

Chaos Engineering is a practice used in software development to build confidence in a system's ability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. It involves proactively injecting failures into a system in a controlled manner to uncover weaknesses before they cause outages for end users. A key aspect is chaos experiments - planned tests where engineers induce failures like shutting down servers, latency, etc. to observe system behavior.

For example, a chaos experiment could involve randomly shutting down instances in an auto-scaling group to test that new ones immediately spin up to replace them. This verifies the system's resilience against instance failures that can happen at any time. Other experiments may kill database connections, make API calls latency spiky, etc. The goal is to surface hidden dependencies and weaknesses before they lead to outages. Chaos experiments provide confidence and learnings to strengthen system reliability at scale. Popular tools like Chaos Monkey help automate controlled experiments. Overall, Chaos Engineering takes a proactive approach to fortifying system resilience rather than reacting to issues after they take down production.