Any engineer or developer knows that finding your system failures while performing a controlled test on a Tuesday afternoon is infinitely better than that same system failing during a Black Friday sales event.
While it's inevitable that our systems will fail over time, the variable components are the length of time it takes for a failure to occur and the breadth of the failure's impact. As operations engineers, our work is to put our systems through rigorous testing and exercises to protect them from breaking down—so we can find the failures on a slow Tuesday instead of on a peak shopping day.
So, how do we make this possible? By introducing chaos.
Deliberately breaking things might sound counterintuitive when your job is to ensure business continuity through systems operations, but understanding the power of chaos testing is where engineering leaders can shine. Understanding that chaos is better than crisis leads teams to build capabilities into their applications, monitoring, logging, and alerting practices to catch failures before they affect customers.
Why Chaos Engineering Is More Important than Ever
Businesses carry cybersecurity insurance because they know that a single breach will cost them tremendously. Think of chaos engineering as business insurance with immediate benefits – disrupting your systems in a controlled environment is insurance for when they run without a controlled environment.
The chaos engineering tools market is projected to rise from $2B USD in 2024, is projected to reach $3.1B USD by 2030 (Chaos engineering tools - Global strategic business report, 2025).
What is driving this growth for chaos engineering tools and adoption? A few factors include:
- Cloud complexity: Companies are moving their distributed applications from single cloud to multi-cloud architectures. The scenarios where failure can occur become more complex and unpredictable.
- Digital transformation pressures: Revenue is now tied to business processes that are driven by software systems. With AI use growing, the pressures on business and technology teams have multiplied.
- Regulatory requirements**: Industries like payments, finance, banking, and healthcare face regulatory pressures to maintain uptime and protect customer data. More tools and people operating in these environments are needed to help these businesses balance their record keeping and their regulatory obligations.
- Cost of downtime: As revenue pressures increase, every minute a business is down creates harmful brand reputation damage and customer disruption.
Building the Chaos Engineering Discipline
To build the chaos engineering discipline, organizations must build this skill systematically, not through random failure experiments. It’s important to build this skill in a structured, collaborative manner.
This framework is helpful to consider when building a strong chaos engineering practice:
- Foundation: Baseline metrics are important for teams to understand what normal looks like for their system. Once properly established, this serves as the foundation to distinguish between chaos and actual normal production behavior.
- Experimentation: Injecting failure into a system or use case in non-production environments is a safe way to test failure. It allows teams to build a hypothesis and learn how the system behaves under stress.
- Production: During low peak times, conducting a controlled and orchestrated chaos test is going to illuminate the weaknesses in your system. You can use this information as a feedback loop to indicate if your non-production environments are reliable proxies of your production environments. The blast radius of a chaos test must be well understood in lower environments before running a test in production.
- Culture: Post-mortems after a chaos test ensure that learnings can be captured and built upon. Teams must be encouraged to celebrate learning from failures. Rather than hiding what did not go well, documenting it and talking about it in a blameless way will build organizational resiliency, a key component of system resiliency.
3 Ways to Start Investing in Chaos Engineering
So, how can your organization start building this chaos engineering discipline?
- Understand where you are starting from. First, clearly identify the failure modes for your business and collect as much data as you can about the normal production operating environment. When everyone has a clear picture of what today looks like, they can start imagining a tomorrow that is anchored in reality.
- Allocate budgets for tools and for cultural transformation. This effort is just as much about the technology as it is about the people behind the technology. Leadership should not view chaos engineering as an overhead. Instead, consider it a clear investment in developer experience, operator experience, and application reliability.
- Standardize and automate processes. To thrive in an aggressively complex landscape, standardizing practices that focus on reliability is a necessary investment. Organizations who can automate their way into testing the failure modes of their systems will gain a market advantage. These organizations will also make it possible for their teams to understand which failures can be turned into self-healing capabilities that require zero intervention.
Transforming Fear into a Competitive Advantage
Once the chaos engineering capability is built, your teams will gain confidence. In my training as a martial artist, my instructors remind me, "To learn technique, you must start slowly."
To build a team that is invested in chaos testing, leaders must be willing to invest in testing their systems to handle unexpected failures. To build confidence in scaling operations, failure experimentation should become part of the organizational DNA.
Chaos engineering has the benefit of improving customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and new customer acquisition. These are not technical metrics, but business outcomes. When systems run with resiliency, this improves the employee experience, which in turn improves customer experience. When your customers face fewer outages and faster recovery times, your teams are spending less time fighting fires and more time building capability. This, in turn, improves the value a business can deliver.
