Casey Rosenthal - Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice

As with any large book, there are countless people who contributed time, energy, and emotional support to the authors, editors, and contributors. As a compendium including sixteen authors total (Nora and Casey plus fourteen contributing authors), the span of the support to make this book happen is difficult to grasp. We appreciate all of the effort from the contributing authors, their patience with us as we refined ideas and scope, and pushing through the editing process.

We were blessed to work with great editors and staff at OReilly. Amelia Blevins, Virginia Wilson, John Devins, and Nikki McDonald were all instrumental in making this book happen. In many ways this book is a work of creation willed into existence by Amelia and Virginia as much as by the authors. Thank you for your patience with us, and the many, many negotiated deadlines.

We appreciate the enthusiastic contributions of our reviewers: Will Gallego, Ryan Frantz, Eric Dobbs, Lane Desborough, Randal Hansen, Michael Kehoe, Mathias Lafeldt, Barry OReilly, Cindy Sridharan, and Benjamin Wilms. Your comments, suggestions, and corrections dramatically improved the quality of this work. Beyond that, it provided ample opportunities for us to expand our own understanding of this complex field and led to additional research that we incorporated back into the work. This book is truly a collaborative work enhanced by your review.

We are indebted in so many ways to the contributing authors: John Allspaw, Peter Alvaro, Nathan Aschbacher, Jason Cahoon, Raji Chockaiyan, Richard Crowley, Bob Edwards, Andy Fleener, Russ Miles, Aaron Rinehart, Logan Rosen, Oleg Surmachev, Lu Tang, and Hao Weng. Obviously this book would not have happened without you. Each one of you made a necessary and fundamental contribution to the content as a whole. We appreciate you as peers and as friends.

We want to thank David Hussman, Kent Beck, and John Allspaw. David, to whom this book is dedicated, encouraged us to evangelize Chaos Engineering outside our limited scope in Silicon Valley. It is in large part because of his support and encouragement that Chaos Engineering became an actual thinga standalone discipline within the broader software engineering community. Likewise, Kent Beck encouraged us to view Chaos Engineering as a construct bigger than us that has the power to transform the way people think about building, deploying, and operating software. John Allspaw gave us the language to explain the fundamentals of Chaos Engineering, by encouraging us to study Human Factors and Safety Systems at Lund University in Sweden. He introduced us to the field of Resilience Engineering, which has proved to be foundational for Chaos Engineering, and is the lens through which we see issues of safety (including availability and security) when we look at sociotechnical systems such as software deployed at scale. All instructors and peers in the program at Lund have also shaped our thinking, especially Johan Bergstrom and Anthony Smokes Smoker.