4.1What Is Chaos Engineering?

Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in its ability to withstand turbulent conditions. It was pioneered at Netflix with the creation of Chaos Monkey in 2011 and has since become an essential practice for any organization running distributed systems.

The core insight is counterintuitive: you break things on purpose, in a controlled way, to discover weaknesses before they cause real incidents. This is not random destruction -- it is the scientific method applied to system resilience.