Power of pipelines + Harness chaos engineering

Building resilient systems is of utmost importance in the DevOps world. As pipelines grow in complexity, ensuring their reliability and resilience becomes essential. Harness Chaos Engineering (CE) has pipelines to orchestrate the entire lifecycle of the reliability test by running controlled chaos experiments. This helps identify weaknesses and failure points. These insights can be used to strengthen your pipelines.

In this blog, we'll explore the additional benefits of integrating Chaos experiments directly into pipelines using Harness.

What is Harness Chaos Engineering?

Harness CE is a powerful tool designed to test the resilience of your applications, infrastructure, and pipelines. By intentionally injecting failures into your environment, Harness CE helps understand how your systems behave under stress, revealing potential weaknesses and allowing you to build more robust and resilient systems.

Why use Chaos Engineering with Pipelines?

Harness CE leverages the concept of pipeline to provide benefits such as:

• Security: As an admin or project owner, you can decide and provide permissions about who can execute chaos experiments using pipelines, who can create experiments, and so on. For example, you can ensure that certain groups/user can only execute a chaos experiment in a pipeline.

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The above image describes how an admin (or project owner) provides permissions for a user to “View”, “Create/Edit”, “Delete”, “Execute” and “Execute via Pipeline” chaos experiments. 

• Notifications: With Admin access, you can receive notifications (or alerts) in various forms, such as slack, email, Microsoft teams, and so on about executing an experiment, failure, rollback and other actions. This provides quick insights into the experiment run.
• Approvals: Add a layer of governance such that you can execute chaos experiments only after receiving an approval from a designated person.
• Create tickets: Harness CE provides an exhaustive list of steps that you can incorporate in your pipeline. One of them is creating or updating a JIRA ticket based on an action or status in your pipeline.
• Script to recover a system in case of failure during test: You can run scripts in the pipeline that help rollback to a stable state in case you encounter a failure while performing the test on your application.
• Resilience probes to define a hypothesis and test results: You can incorporate resilience probes in a chaos experiment pipeline to perform health checks on the experiment and determine the resilience score of the experiment.

To get hands-on experience executing a chaos experiment in a pipeline, go to Pipeline Integration with Harness CE.

Best Practices for Chaos Engineering in Pipelines

Here are some best practices to follow when integrating Chaos Engineering with pipelines:

1. Start with a small blast radius: Begin with experiments that target specific pipeline stages and have a small blast radius. Gradually increase the scope and complexity of your experiments as you gain confidence.
2. Automate Experiment Execution: Incorporate chaos experiments into the pipelines as automated steps to ensure continuous reliability checks.
3. Monitor and Analyze Results: Regularly review the results of your chaos experiments and adjust your pipeline configurations based on the findings.
4. Fail Fast, Recover Quickly: Design your pipeline to fail fast when issues are detected and recover quickly to minimize downtime.

Conclusion

Integrating Chaos Engineering into pipelines with Harness is a powerful way to enhance your application's resilience and reliability. By continuously testing your pipeline against various failure scenarios, you can identify weaknesses, improve system robustness, and ensure quick and reliable deployments.

Harness helps execute chaos experiments with ease and provides the tools to monitor, analyze, and act on the results effectively. Start executing chaos experiments in pipelines today and transform the way you manage reliability in your DevOps processes!