Chaos Mesh 2.6: Chaos Engineering Platform Evolution

Introduction

Chaos Mesh 2.6, released on April 5, 2023, is most relevant if you’re operating Kubernetes in production and want fewer surprises. This post walks through the highlights and the kinds of operational scenarios where the changes tend to matter first.

Experiment Type Improvements

• Network chaos improvements provide more sophisticated network failure injection.
• Pod chaos enhancements enable better pod failure and resource stress testing.
• IO chaos improvements provide more realistic storage failure scenarios.
• Time chaos capabilities enable clock skew and time-based testing.

Observability Enhancements

1. Metrics expansion exposes detailed chaos experiment metrics for Prometheus.
2. Event tracking improvements provide better visibility into chaos experiment execution.
3. Dashboard integration enables better visualization of chaos experiments and results.
4. Alerting capabilities enable proactive monitoring of chaos experiment failures.

Kubernetes Integration

• CRD improvements provide better resource management and lifecycle handling.
• Operator enhancements simplify Chaos Mesh installation and management.
• RBAC integration provides fine-grained permissions for chaos operations.
• Resource management improvements provide better resource allocation and limits.

Reliability & Safety

• Experiment validation improvements detect and prevent dangerous experiments.
• Safety mechanisms provide automatic experiment termination on critical failures.
• Recovery automation enables automatic system recovery after experiments.
• Audit logging tracks all chaos operations for compliance and analysis.

Getting Started

curl -sSL https://mirrors.chaos-mesh.org/v2.6.0/install.sh | bash
kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chaos-mesh/chaos-mesh/v2.6.0/manifests/crd.yaml

Create a chaos experiment:

apiVersion: chaos-mesh.org/v1alpha1
kind: PodChaos
metadata:
  name: pod-failure-example
spec:
  action: pod-failure
  mode: one
  duration: "30s"
  selector:
    namespaces:
    - default
    labelSelectors:
      app: my-app
  scheduler:
    cron: "@every 2m"

Summary

Chaos Mesh 2.6 provides teams with powerful chaos engineering capabilities for testing system resilience and reliability.