Chaosmania

Instant chaos for your microservices application!

created by Causely

Chaosmania Documentation

Introduction

ChaosMania is a tool designed to simulate various application problems in a microservices architecture running on Kubernetes. It provides a set of actions that can be triggered to simulate different scenarios, allowing users to experiment with the resilience and stability of their microservices-based applications.

Actions

ChaosMania provides several actions that can be executed to simulate different application problems. These actions are located in the pkg/actions/ directory. Here is a list of available actions:

• allocate_memory.go: Simulates memory allocation issues.
• burn.go: Simulates high CPU usage or resource exhaustion.
• global_mutex_unlock.go: Simulates a global mutex unlock issue.
• http_response.go: Simulates HTTP response issues.
• print.go: Simulates printing or logging events.
• sleep.go: Simulates delay or slow response times.
• background_task.go: Simulates long-running background tasks.
• global_mutex_lock.go: Simulates a global mutex lock issue.
• http_request.go: Simulates HTTP request issues.
• mysql.go: Simulates problems related to MySQL databases.
• postgresql.go: Simulates problems related to PostgreSQL databases.
• redis.go: Simulates problems related to Redis databases.
• utils.go: Provides utility functions used by other actions.

Plans

ChaosMania uses plans to define and trigger specific scenarios. These plans are created by the client and are located in the plans/examples/ directory. Each plan is defined in a YAML file and specifies the actions to be executed and their configuration parameters.

Here is a list of example plans available in the plans/examples/ directory:

• acquire_lock.yaml: Simulates lock acquisition issues.
• background_task.yaml: Simulates long-running background task scenarios.
• http_request.yaml: Simulates HTTP request-related scenarios.
• mysql.yaml: Simulates scenarios specific to MySQL databases.
• print.yaml: Simulates printing or logging events.
• allocate_memory.yaml: Simulates scenarios related to memory allocation.
• burn.yaml: Simulates high CPU usage or resource exhaustion.
• http_response.yaml: Simulates scenarios related to HTTP responses.
• postgresql.yaml: Simulates scenarios specific to PostgreSQL databases.
• redis.yaml: Simulates scenarios specific to Redis databases.
• sleep.yaml: Simulates scenarios related to delays or slow response times.

Local Development

Server

go run ./cmd/chaosmania server --port 8080

Client

go run ./cmd/chaosmania client -p ./plans/examples/burn.yaml --host localhost --port 8080

Build Container Images

make image

Deploy server to Kubernetes

Single server and/or the boutique microservices:

helm upgrade --install --create-namespace --namespace chaosmania single ./helm/single
helm upgrade --install --create-namespace --namespace chaosmania boutique ./helm/boutique

Start a job

Using kubectl

kubectl create job chaos-plan --image=quay.io/causely/chaosmania -- /bin/chaosmania client -p /plans/boutique.yaml --host <host> --port 8080

Using helm

helm upgrade --install --create-namespace --namespace chaosmania client ./helm/client

Optionally provide a custom plan from the plans directory

helm upgrade --install --create-namespace --namespace chaosmania client ./helm/client --set chaos.host=frontend --set chaos.plan="/plans/boutique.yaml"