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Build Resilient Applications by Simulating Outages with Azure Chaos Studio

Jeremy_Mohn's avatar
Jeremy_Mohn
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Nov 15, 2023

We are excited to announce the General Availability of Azure Chaos Studio, an experimentation platform for improving application resilience with chaos testing by deliberately introducing faults that simulate real-world outages. 

 

Chaos Studio enables users to assess how applications respond to real-world disruptions like network delays, unexpected storage failures, expired secrets, or datacenter outages. Using Chaos Studio, customers can design and conduct experiments with a wide range of agent-based and service-direct faults to better understand how to proactively improve the resilience of their application.

 

What’s new since preview?

Since we debuted Azure Chaos Studio, we have enabled several new capabilities based on customer feedback, along with new faults and feature improvements over the course of public preview.

 

Here are a few recent highlights:

  • Experiment templates let you quickly get up and running with common experiment designs, such as VMSS instance shutdown within Availability Zones and Azure Active Directory outage. 
  • Identity management improvements allow you to utilize user-assigned managed identities and custom role assignment functionality in your chaos experiments.
  • Dynamic targets allow you to select resources in your Azure subscription with a runtime query, such as tags, resource groups, or resource types.
  • Load testing faults can be used to start and stop an Azure Load Testing test case in your Azure Chaos Studio experiment.

You can use Azure Chaos Studio for running manual Business Continuity and Disaster Relief drills and Game Days, or as part of your CI/CD pipeline to programmatically gate code flow. You can also integrate Azure Chaos Studio with your existing monitoring and observability tools, such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, or Log Analytics, to visualize experiment impact.

 

Get started with Azure Chaos Studio

You can get started with Azure Chaos Studio by creating an Azure Chaos Studio resource in the Azure portal and building your first experiment. Check out the Azure Chaos Studio documentation to help understand the concepts in chaos experiments. We’re excited to hear your feedback on what features you’d like to see next.

 

Learn more about Azure Chaos Studio

Updated Nov 15, 2023
Version 2.0
  • AndrewCitera's avatar
    AndrewCitera
    Copper Contributor

    Jeremy_Mohn thank you for this great blog post!  I noticed that Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server does not have a supported Azure Chaos Studio Fault library provider.

     

    Does Microsoft have published guidance for incorporating non-supported resources into Azure Chaos Studio Experiments? Or any suggested workarounds? For example, I also noticed that there wasn't an ability to trigger an Azure Automation Runbook or call an Azure CLI command remotely which could trigger an Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server fault serving as a custom fault library.