Microsoft launches Azure Chaos Studio to help developers cope with real-life situations

You may have heard of Chaos Monkey before. This is a tool that Netflix built to test the resilience of their IT infrastructure. It deliberately and randomly disables computers, networks and systems at will. Nobody knows what component the monkey will rip apart next. The idea is that if you can develop a system that deals well with these conditions then you will have created something that can be resilient in the face of unplanned network outages and problems in the real world.

Chaos Monkey isn’t the only implementation like this, and Netflix aren’t the only company to have created something to test their own products before releasing them into production.

Now, at Ignite November 2021, Microsoft have launched their own version – Azure Chaos Studio – to test and improve application resiliency for Azure-based solutions. Chaos Studio will make it possible for developers, customers of products, even potential customers evaluating solutions, to intentionally disrupt applications to see how to respond. For instance, Chaos Studio can simulate secrets expiring, storage outages and latency, components suddenly being unavailable, even a full datacenter outage.

I think this is great for any Azure-based solution, including Teams Apps. Plenty of Teams Dev solutions use multiple Azure technologies such as Web Apps and Table Storage which need to work together. Interruptions to any component can often have unexpected side effects, so being able to test out how solutions perform in less-than-ideal conditions will result in solutions that are more resilient and able to cope with issues in the real world.

Chaos Studio is available today in preview. You can also read more about Chaos engineering on the Microsoft Docs site.

You can also read the full Ignite announcement here: Announcing the Public Preview of Azure Chaos Studio