There is an unmistakable buzz and excitement that the chaos carnival is generating, and I just can’t wait for it to begin. While tons of material has been generated about chaos engineering - the what, why & how over the last few years, nothing beats the experience of hearing actual practitioners talk about their learnings. The chaos carnival has an impressive line-up of such speakers and their experiences & accounts will add to the abundant wealth of info out there. As members of the organizing team, and more importantly advocates of cloud-native chaos engineering, we felt this is also a good opportunity to ease people into chaos engineering via simple bootcamps during the break period.

As the attendees flit through different tracks, they will also have an opportunity to take a low-level, hands-on intro to chaos use cases - that we will accomplish using LitmusChaos. Unlike most demos/intro sessions we have conducted in the past during meetups & conferences, the idea behind these bootcamps is to take an actual real-world application (like Kafka, Percona MySQL) - not a hello service :) - and inject chaos with a well-defined hypothesis around the failure.

During the session, you will also be introduced to the observability elements in chaos engineering & how experiments both generate as well as consume observability info that helps you to validate the hypothesis. Considering these bootcamps are scheduled during breaks, they will be split into two parts: an instructor-led tutorial explaining each step followed by an optional guided lab that you can join-in to experience, where the participants will be provided access to a pre-packaged Kubernetes cluster environment that has been bootstrapped with the necessary dependencies allowing them to recreate and experience the chaos steps.

During the tutorial, we will also discuss the KPIs on how you can measure your progress around your efforts on chaos engineering.

To participate in the bootcamp on Days 1 & 2 of the event, please join & track the announcements in the chaos carnival slack channel. If you’d like to also perform the optional lab exercise, please do reach out via email (Karthik.s, Udit Gaurav or Shubham Chaudhary) or DMs on the chaos carnival slack channel. There are a limited set of pre-packaged environments available - the access to which will be emailed on a first-come-first-service basis and stay active for the duration of the lab!

We hope that these sessions are fun, pique your interest in chaos engineering, reduce your apprehension and inspire you to dig more so you take those bold steps towards application resilience. They would also serve as a nice indicator of the prerequisites needed to kickstart these efforts in your organization.