LitmusChaos

Open Source Chaos Engineering Platform

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Overview

LitmusChaos is an open source Chaos Engineering platform that enables teams to identify weaknesses & potential outages in infrastructures by inducing chaos tests in a controlled way. Developers & SREs can practice Chaos Engineering with LitmusChaos as it is easy to use, based on modern Chaos Engineering principles & community collaborated. It is 100% open source & a CNCF project.

LitmusChaos takes a cloud-native approach to create, manage and monitor chaos. The platform itself runs as a set of microservices and uses Kubernetes custom resources (CRs) to define the chaos intent, as well as the steady state hypothesis.

At a high-level, Litmus comprises of:

• Chaos Control Plane: A centralized chaos management tool called chaos-center, which helps construct, schedule and visualize Litmus chaos workflows
• Chaos Execution Plane Services: Made up of a chaos agent and multiple operators that execute & monitor the experiment within a defined target Kubernetes environment.

At the heart of the platform are the following chaos custom resources:

• ChaosExperiment: A resource to group the configuration parameters of a particular fault. ChaosExperiment CRs are essentially installable templates that describe the library carrying out the fault, indicate permissions needed to run it & the defaults it will operate with. Through the ChaosExperiment, Litmus supports BYOC (bring-your-own-chaos) that helps integrate (optional) any third-party tooling to perform the fault injection.

• ChaosEngine: A resource to link a Kubernetes application workload/service, node or an infra component to a fault described by the ChaosExperiment. It also provides options to tune the run properties and specify the steady state validation constraints using 'probes'. ChaosEngine is watched by the Chaos-Operator, which reconciles it (triggers experiment execution) via runners.

The ChaosExperiment & ChaosEngine CRs are embedded within a Workflow object that can string together one or more experiments in a desired order.

• ChaosResult: A resource to hold the results of the experiment run. It provides details of the success of each validation constraint, the revert/rollback status of the fault as well as a verdict. The Chaos-exporter reads the results and exposes information as prometheus metrics. ChaosResults are especially useful during automated runs.

ChaosExperiment CRs are hosted on hub.litmuschaos.io. It is a central hub where the application developers or vendors share their chaos experiments so that their users can use them to increase the resilience of the applications in production.

Use cases

• For Developers: To run chaos experiments during application development as an extension of unit testing or integration testing.
• For CI/CD pipeline builders: To run chaos as a pipeline stage to find bugs when the application is subjected to fail paths in a pipeline.
• For SREs: To plan and schedule chaos experiments into the application and/or surrounding infrastructure. This practice identifies the weaknesses in the deployment system and increases resilience.

Getting Started with Litmus

To get started, check out the Litmus Docs and specifically the Installation section of the Getting Started with Litmus page.

Contributing to Chaos Hub

Check out the Contributing Guidelines for the Chaos Hub

Community

Community Resources:

Feel free to reach out if you have any queries, concerns, or feature requests

• Give us a star ⭐️ - If you are using LitmusChaos or think it is an interesting project, we would love a star ❤️

• Follow LitmusChaos on Twitter @LitmusChaos.

• Subscribe to the LitmusChaos YouTube channel for regular updates & meeting recordings.

• To join our Slack Community and meet our community members, put forward your questions & opinions, join the #litmus channel on the Kubernetes Slack.

Community Meetings

1. Community Meetings
2. These will be hosted every 3rd Wednesday of every month at 5:30 PM GMT /6:30 PM CEST /10 PM IST

3. These meetings cover community updates, new feature or release announcements, and user/adopter stories. Everyone in the community is welcome to join and participate in discussions.

4. Contributor Meetings

5. These will be hosted every second & last Thursday of every month at 2:30 PM GMT /3:30 PM CEST /7 PM IST
6. These meetings focus on both technical and non-technical contributions to LitmusChaos. Maintainers, current contributors, and aspiring contributors are encouraged to join to discuss issues, fixes, enhancements, and future contributions.

Fill out the LitmusChaos Meetings invite form to get your Calendar invite!

• Sync Up Agenda & Meeting Notes
• Release Tracker

Videos

• What if Your System Experiences an Outage? Let's Build a Resilient Systems with Chaos Engineering @ CNCF
• Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Zero Trust Chaos Experiments in Cloud Native Environments @ CNCF
• LitmusChaos, with Karthik Satchitanand @ The Kubernetes Podcast from Google
• Cultural Shifts: Fostering a Chaos First Mindset in Platform Engineering @ CNCF
• Fire in the Cloud: Bringing Managed Services Under the Ambit of Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering @ CNCF
• Security Controls for Safe Chaos Experimentation @ CNCF
• Chaos Engineering For Hybrid Targets With LitmusChaos @ CNCF
• Cloud Native Live: Litmus Chaos Engine and a microservices demo app
• Chaos Engineering hands-on - An SRE ideating Chaos Experiments and using LitmusChaos | July 2022
• Achieve Digital Product Resiliency with Chaos Engineering
• Case Study: Bringing Chaos Engineering to the Cloud Native Developers @ CNCF
• Cloud Native Chaos Engineering with LitmusChaos @ CNCF
• How to create Chaos Experiments with Litmus | Litmus Chaos tutorial @ Is it Observable
• Cloud Native Chaos Engineering Preview With LitmusChaos
• Get started with Chaos Engineering with Litmus @ Containers from the Couch
• Litmus 2 - Chaos Engineering Meets Argo Workflows @ DevOps Toolkit
• Hands-on with Litmus 2.0 | Rawkode Live @ Rawkode Academy
• Introducing LitmusChaos 2.0 / Dok Talks #74 @ DoK.community
• Introduction to Cloud Native Chaos Engineering @ Kunal Kushwaha
• #EveryoneCanContribute cafe: Litmus - Chaos Engineering for your Kubernetes @ GitLab Unfiltered
• Litmus - Chaos Engineering for Kubernetes (CNCFMinutes 9) @ Saiyam Pathak
• Chaos Engineering with Litmus Chaos by Prithvi Raj || HACKODISHA Workshop @ Webwiz

And More....

Blogs

• CNCF: Introduction to LitmusChaos
• Hackernoon: Manage and Monitor Chaos via Litmus Custom Resources
• Observability Considerations in Chaos: The Metrics Story

Community Blogs:

• LiveWyer: LitmusChaos Showcase: Chaos Experiments in a Helm Chart Test Suite
• Jessica Cherry: Test Kubernetes cluster failures and experiments in your terminal
• Yang Chuansheng(KubeSphere): KubeSphere 部署 Litmus 至 Kubernetes 开启混沌实验
• Saiyam Pathak(Civo): Chaos Experiments on Kubernetes using Litmus to ensure your cluster is production ready
• Andreas Krivas(Container Solutions):Comparing Chaos Engineering Tools for Kubernetes Workloads
• Akram Riahi(WeScale):Chaos Engineering : Litmus sous tous les angles
• Prashanto Priyanshu(LensKart):Lenskart’s approach to Chaos Engineering-Part 2
• DevsDay.ru(Russian):LitmusChaos at Kubecon EU '21

Adopters

Check out the Adopters of LitmusChaos

(Send a PR to the above page if you are using Litmus in your chaos engineering practice)

License

Litmus is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text. Some of the projects used by the Litmus project may be governed by a different license, please refer to its specific license.

Litmus Chaos is part of the CNCF Projects.

Important Links

Litmus Docs

CNCF Landscape