WTH is Chaos Engineering?! A Quick Look at Breaking Things on Purpose

Ever wonder why some teams intentionally break their own systems? Welcome to the world of chaos engineering — a practice that's not just for Netflix-scale infrastructure, but for any team that wants to build resilient, reliable applications. In this session, we'll demystify chaos engineering and explain why intentionally breaking things is actually the smart move. You'll learn what chaos engineering really is (in plain English, no buzzwords), why waiting for production failures is a terrible strategy, how to start experimenting with controlled failure locally, before it happens in the wild, real-world examples of chaos experiments that catch bugs you'd never find in traditional testing, and tools and techniques to get started without blowing up your infrastructure. Through practical demos using LocalStack's cloud emulation and chaos engineering tools, we'll simulate failures like network latency, service outages, and resource exhaustion right from your laptop. If you've ever said "it worked on my machine" only to watch it crash in production, this talk is for you—let's break things intentionally so they don't break unexpectedly.

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