it wasn’t luck, it was very deliberately engineered for. The article does lack a good bit of context about the Netflix infra:
https://netflixtechblog.com/the-netflix-simian-army-16e57fba...
https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
In We built a self-healing system to survive a concurrency bug at NetflixNetflix
chaosmonkey
Go2016–2024
Netflix / chaosmonkey
chaosmonkey
Chaos Monkey is a resiliency tool that helps applications tolerate random instance failures.
24Distinct people
25Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
17.2KGitHub stars
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What it is
Chaos Monkey is a resiliency tool that helps applications tolerate random instance failures.
GitHub
Where it is used
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HN mentions by year25 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-10-19 14:13:52 UTC to 2024-11-13 09:42:58 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Chaos Monkey randomly terminates virtual machine instances and containers that
run inside of your production environment. Exposing engineers to
failures more frequently incentivizes them to build resilient services.
See the documentation for info on how to use Chaos Monkey.
Chaos Monkey is an example of a tool that follows the
Principles of Chaos Engineering.
Requirements
This version of Chaos Monkey is fully integrated with Spinnaker, the
continuous delivery platform that we use at Netflix. You must be managing your
apps with Spinnaker to use Chaos Monkey to terminate instances.
Chaos Monkey should work with any backend that Spinnaker supports (AWS, Google
Compute Engine, Azure, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry). It has been tested with
AWS, GCE, and Kubernetes.
Install locally
To install the Chaos Monkey binary on your local machine:
go get github.com/netflix/chaosmonkey/cmd/chaosmonkey
How to deploy
See the docs for instructions on how to configure and deploy Chaos Monkey.
Support
Simian Army Google group.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
25 sources> Redundancy, scalability, decoupling, resilience, best possible handling of errors, cost optimization, etc. may be more important at the scale Netflix operates at.
So much that they built a tool to intentionally make things difficult (read: it arbitrarily stops production system processes/containers/etc.) and help inform what decisions to make in favor of fault tolerance.
> Exposing engineers to failures more frequently incentivizes them to build resilient services.
https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering
In What happens when you make a move in lichess.org?Never saw this communicated by Google, but Netflix is the company I have in mind for doing that: https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
In Zero downtime Postgres upgradesI do actually agree with you, what I am saying is that a big part of Linux testing is crowdsourced: you and I and hundreds of millions are testing if there's a regression every time we run Linux, or running buggy, incorrect software on machines in random levels of stability and soundness.
Few unit tests in the kernel would be able to compete with so many chaos monkeys (a reference to Netflix's https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey).
In Ask HN: Why the Linux Kernel doesn't have unit tests?It might be cliche with AWS at this point but how much meta services does it have, as in services with sole purpose of maintaining your own aws account?
Like Well Architected Tool/Framework, Trusted Advisor etc?
I'm impressed that chaos monkey [0] is now a first party service. So you can break your own cloud account on demand and pay for breaking it?
[0]: https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey (I think first popular open source implementation of chaos engineering)
In AWS Fault Injection SimulatorRandomly terminate instances of your production environment
1 points · Open discussionChaos engineering is the practice of deliberately breaking live systems to improve their robustness. The first widely noted system is Chaos Monkey developed at Netflix. https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey Years ago, I had the same reaction to "extreme programming"
In “Chaos Engineering” – Published by O'ReillyChaos Monkey is a tool that helps applications tolerate random instance failures
1 points · Open discussionBut there's no "debate" here to be had. All the high scale companies (Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, others) do not rely on their distributed system nodes being able to wind down in an orderly fashion. Shit, Netflix and Google (and likely others as well) stage fault tolerance exercises, taking random nodes (or entire datacenters) out of rotation and checking if things still work. There's no way to get to five nines if you expect your program to always behave.
Here's one from Netflix that will give you an ulcer: https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
Here's what Google does: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/conference-program/...
>> we all get dumber for it
Not _all_. Only those who feel inclined to reject the obvious.
In Twelve-factor app development on Google CloudThis is why Netflix made "chaosmonkey" and other tools nearly a decade ago: https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
In Trigger a Kernel Panic to Diagnose Unresponsive EC2 InstancesAsk HN: How to build chaos-gorilla for fault injection testing?
Netflix's Chaos Monkey [1] and the Simian army [2] are great projects for fault injection testing. I am interested in developing a version of chaos-gorilla, taking down whole AZ or region.
How should I approach it? AWS offers API to terminate instances and restart it but it's hard to automate completely. Any ideas will be appreciated.
[1] https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
[2] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/the-netflix-simian-army-16e57fbab116
1 points · Open discussionI have not used it, but I have heard this is a very useful tool https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
In Principles of Chaos Engineering (2018)I'd say yes. I heard about this tool just a week ago at a developer conference.
https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
In Google Cloud Is DownThe difference is that when AWS goes down, Netflix/Spotify still have backups and could adapt infrastructure if the outage involved permanent data-loss. You're talking about the people who built https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
I'd argue that it should be _easier_ for a 2-man company to adapt to cloud service outages, as they likely don't have to keep up with nearly as many backups or moving parts.
In "DigitalOcean Killed Our Company"Showing the 15 most recent of 25 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.