Microsoft Azure Chaos Studio: advancing resilience

Microsoft Azure Chaos Studio helps you measure, understand, and improve your cloud application resilience. Cloud applications are constantly exposed to various disruptions and failures, such as network latency, storage outages, or even datacenter outages. These incidents can affect the performance, availability, and reliability of your applications, and ultimately impact your business or mission.

 

 

Azure Chaos Studio is a fully managed chaos engineering experimentation platform that lets you inject real-world faults into your application in a controlled manner. By doing so, you can observe how your application responds to different scenarios, identify gaps, and plan mitigations before your customers are impacted by a problem.

 

What is Azure Chaos Studio?

Azure Chaos Studio is a service that uses chaos engineering to help you measure, understand, and build application and service resilience to real-world incidents, such as a region going down or an application failure causing 100% CPU usage on a VM.

Chaos engineering is a methodology by which you inject real-world faults into your application to run controlled fault injection experiments. Resilience is the capability of a system to handle and recover from disruptions. Application disruptions can cause errors and failures that can adversely affect your business or mission. Whether you’re developing, migrating, or operating Azure applications, it’s important to validate and improve your application’s resilience.

This video explains the functions of Azure Chaos Studio:

 

How does Azure Chaos Studio work?

Azure Chaos Studio provides an easy and secure way to get started with chaos engineering. You can use experiment templates and a library of faults to disrupt your apps intentionally. You can also integrate load testing into your experiments to simulate real-world customer traffic. You can run experiments on your own terms, whether it’s in your development, test, or production environment, with real or simulated load, or as part of your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

Azure Chaos Studio supports various resilience validation scenarios that span the service development and operations lifecycle. You can use it to:

  • Reproduce and prevent incidents that affected your application.
  • Prepare for major events or seasons with load, scale, performance, and resilience testing.
  • Run business continuity and disaster recovery drills.
  • Test application resilience against region outages, network errors, high-stress events, or noisy neighbors.
  • Develop application performance benchmarks and plan capacity needs.
  • Migrate services from on-premises or other cloud environments without compromising resilience.
  • Build confidence in services built on cloud-native architectures.
  • Validate your live site tooling, observability data, and on-call processes.

 

 

What are the benefits of Azure Chaos Studio?

Microsoft Azure Chaos Studio is a powerful tool for improving your application resilience and reliability.

  • Accelerate discovery of hard-to-find problems, from late-stage development through production.
  • Identify gaps and plan mitigations before your customers are impacted by a problem.
  • Subject your Azure applications to real or simulated faults.
  • Observe how your applications respond to real-world disruptions.
  • Integrate chaos engineering experiments into any phase of quality validation.
  • Use the same tools as Microsoft engineers to build resilience of cloud services.
  • Improve the reliability of your Azure applications.

Azure Chaos Studio is a fully managed service that takes care of the complexity and security of running chaos experiments. You don’t need to manage tools and scripts, and you can spend more time learning about your application’s resilience.

 

 

How to get started with Azure Chaos Studio?

To get started with Azure Chaos Studio, you need an Azure subscription and an Azure resource group. Please contact SCHNEIDER IT MANAGEMENT to purchase a Microsoft Azure subscription.

Once you have an Azure subscription and a resource group, you can create a Chaos Studio workspace from the Azure portal. A Chaos Studio workspace is a container for your chaos experiments and resources. You can create multiple workspaces for different environments or teams.

After you create a Chaos Studio workspace, you can start creating and running chaos experiments. You can choose from a variety of experiment templates and faults or create your own custom experiments. You can also monitor and analyze the results of your experiments from the Chaos Studio dashboard.

 

More information

To learn more about how to use Azure Chaos Studio, you can check out the website https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/chaos-studio/.

You can also read this article that explains how Microsoft engineers use Azure Chaos Studio to build resilience of cloud services: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/advancing-microsoft-azure-resilience-with-chaos-studio/.

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After you create a Chaos Studio workspace, you can start creating and running chaos experiments. You can choose from a variety of experiment templates and faults or create your own custom experiments. You can also monitor and analyze the results of your experiments from the Chaos Studio dashboard.

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