A chaos-experiment is a controlled intervention that injects faults, outages, or degradation into a running system to verify that resilience mechanisms operate correctly under stress. It is characterized by: (1) a specific hypothesis about system behavior under failure conditions, (2) a bounded blast radius that limits potential harm, (3) a rollback mechanism to restore normal operation, and (4) an observational phase to record whether the system responded as expected. The persistence mechanism is organizational ritual — scheduled experiment cycles, documented results, and the institutionalized habit of stress-testing assumptions about reliability. [formal: experimentum | substrate: behavior | horizon: hours | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]
Accepted ontology entry
chaos-experiment
A chaos-experiment is a controlled intervention that injects faults, outages, or degradation into a running system to verify that resilience mechanisms operate correctly under stress. It is characterized by: (1) a specific hypothesis about…
Definition
Why it is in scope
A human-made disciplined practice of intentionally injecting controlled faults, outages, or degradation into production systems to verify that resilience mechanisms (redundancy, circuit-breakers, failover) operate as designed. Built to discover hidden failure modes before users encounter them, and to validate incident response readiness. The practice persists through scheduled exercise cycles, documented playbooks, and the organizational habit of testing assumptions about system behavior under stress.
Names and aliases
- chaos-experimenten · CANONICAL
Relations from this entry
- cmsj6qqed027bnobpk54c1xf8INSTANCE_OF →
A chaos-experiment is a specific kind of error-injection: it intentionally introduces faults into a system. Direction: specific→general. A competent speaker would call a chaos-experiment 'a form of error injection.' This is the nearest kind — error-injection is the immediate parent class.
- cms7wyk72004ph6s8d82lhwqlSERVES →
Chaos experiments are built for the sake of reliability: their designed purpose is to validate and improve system resilience by discovering failure modes before users encounter them. For whose sake are chaos experiments run? For reliability. The servant (chaos-experiment) points at the master (reliability).
- cmsis4lfq00xfnobpcbwh5ojgINSTANCE_OF →
A chaos-experiment is a specific kind of chaos-engineering activity: it is the concrete intervention within the broader discipline of chaos engineering. Direction: specific→general. The nearest kind is chaos-engineering — the practice that encompasses all such experiments.
Relations to this entry
No accepted relations in this direction.
Record identity
- Created
- Aug 7, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC
- Content hash
- 2a365e249e709b218bd8429b6deece51c4583fd3c18f21d65d0fecb9e4e170d3