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Chaos engineering and databases

25 August,2021 by Rambler

Embrace the CHAOS!  (aka resiliency) 

Chaos engineering is defined as "the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.” from principlesofchaos.org .  It's a discipline practised by many  companies - notably Netflix,Google & Amazon.    

Distributed systems are becoming even more complex - surface area is growing,exposing systems to a wider range of vulnerabilities. The old assumptions of developers and engineers are being questioned . Typical assumptions such as networks are stable, topologies never change , only one admin can do everything & only one data centre.  

Chaos engineering is not about breaking things in production!   

 

Chaos_engieering

There is lots of documentation around this topic . principlesofchaos.org   is a great resource and outline an experiment framework. 

 

1) Define and measure your system’s “steady state.”

2)Create a hypothesis

3) Simulate what could happen in the real world - "What could go wrong?" and then simulate. O even "You never run out things that can go wrong"

4)Prove or disprove your hypothesis.    Compare steady-state with impact of disturbance , and improve

 

Thinking about databases . Chaos engineering has loads of documentation around stateless devices. But there aren't as many ideas discussed around managing large database systems. 

 

These are some ideas to start a conversation .   The possibilities are endless - but more value is gained from focusing on potential failures that's fairly likely to happen and could potentially have a significant impact.

In order to improve a system , you must fail constantly & strengthen. Increasing confidence comes from introducing turbulence 

-> Clustered database environments - turning off replicas , check to see other replicas are getting promoted

-> Simulate ransomware attack such as encrypt\make unavailable a database. Can you complete a system recovery ?

->Testing the supporting systems around the database server systems - e.g Monitoring system , 

-> Backups - Testing of restores!!!!!!!!   if right that was required - could you complete a point-in-time restore

 

 

Read more on systems management

The Agile DBA

Day 2 Operations - Are you ready?

 


Author: Rambler (http://www.dba-ninja.com)


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