In order to understand both the function and the name of the chaos monkey, imagine the following: a chimpanzee rampaging through a data center, one of the air-conditioned warehouses of blinking machines that power everything from Google to Facebook. He yanks cables here, smashes a box there, and generally tears up the place. The software chaos monkey does a virtual version of the same, shutting down random machines and processes at unexpected times. The challenge is to have your particular service—Facebook messaging, Google’s Gmail, your startup’s blog, whatever—survive the monkey’s
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