Linux Resilience Testing with Harness Chaos Engineering

A History of Chaos (Engineering, not the Universe)

Once upon a time, engineers believed that if they built their systems strong enough, nothing would ever fail. Then reality happened. Networks dropped. Servers crashed. Applications froze. And thus, Chaos Engineering was born—not as an act of destruction, but as a method to test things in a controlled way so we can fix them before customers even notice something’s wrong.

The concept gained traction in 2010 when Netflix unleashed Chaos Monkey, a tool that randomly shut down production instances to test resilience. Fast forward to today, and organizations across industries—like Netflix, Amazon, Google, Target, and Harness—are embracing chaos engineering as a core reliability practice to ensure system resilience and uptime.

But what about Linux-based systems—the backbone of modern infrastructure? From cloud servers to on-premises environments, Linux runs the world. And just like any system, it needs to be battle-tested. That’s where Harness Chaos Engineering steps in, providing powerful, safe, and automated resilience testing for Linux environments.

Let’s explore five critical Linux chaos experiments you can run today to harden your applications and infrastructure against failure.

1️⃣ CPU Stress: Can Your System Handle the Heat?

🔥 What happens when your system maxes out its CPU?
Imagine your application is humming along fine—until a sudden traffic spike (or a rogue process) consumes all CPU resources. Will your system stay responsive, or will it grind to a halt?

👉 Test It: The CPU Stress experiment overloads your processor to see how well your system prioritizes critical processes under high CPU usage. Start small configuring it to consume 20% of the CPU and gradually increase to 100%.

✅ Why It Matters: Ensures your services stay responsive during peak loads and prevents CPU starvation.

2️⃣ Memory Stress: Running Out of RAM?

🧠 How does your system behave when memory is depleted?
Memory leaks, inefficient caching, or high loads can lead to Out-Of-Memory (OOM) crashes. This test simulates high RAM consumption to check whether your application can recover or panics and dies.

👉 Test It: The Memory Stress experiment overloads system memory to evaluate how your applications handle OOM conditions gracefully.

✅ Why It Matters: Helps prevent crashes caused by unoptimized memory usage, ensuring smooth operation even under heavy load.

3️⃣ Network Latency: The Internet’s Favorite Saboteur

🌐 What happens when your network slows down?
A microservices architecture is only as strong as its weakest network link. Network latency can quickly degrade performance if your system relies on APIs or external services.

👉 Test It: The Network Latency experiment introduces artificial delays in network traffic, letting you observe how your application behaves under laggy conditions. Start testing with 500ms and gradually increase to find your tipping points of failure.

✅ Why It Matters: Ensures critical functions don’t time out or fail under poor network conditions.

4️⃣ Disk Fill: What Happens When You Run Out of Space?

💾 Does your system gracefully handle full disks?
Running out of storage is a nightmare. Logs, databases, or file uploads can rapidly consume disk space, potentially halting everything.

👉 Test It: The Disk Fill experiment simulates a near-full disk to test how your system reacts when storage resources are depleted.

✅ Why It Matters: This role ensures applications don’t break when storage runs low and verifies cleanup mechanisms, such as automated log rotation, temporary file cleanup, and proactive disk space monitoring, work as expected.

5️⃣ Service Restart: Can Your Apps Recover?

🔄 If a critical service crashes, does it restart smoothly?
In distributed systems, services stop and restart constantly. But what if your app doesn’t handle this well? You could experience cascading failures and extended downtime.

👉 Test It: The Service Restart experiment forcefully stops and restarts a system service, testing how well your application recovers.

✅ Why It Matters: Ensures mission-critical services restart automatically and correctly, minimizing downtime.

Try These Experiments for Free with Harness Chaos Engineering 🚀

Chaos Engineering isn’t about breaking things for fun—it’s about finding weaknesses before they cause real-world outages. With Harness Chaos Engineering, you can safely run these tests in staging or production, with built-in safeguards to avoid accidental disasters.

And the best part? You can try it for free! 🎉

🔗 Start testing today with over 30 Linux resilience tests!

‍ Sign up for the Harness Chaos Free Plan