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In 5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS, Netflix's John Ciancutti says the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly. In the cloud it's expected instances can fail at any time, so you always have to be prepared. In the real world we prepare by running drills. Remember all those exciting fire drills? It's not just fire drills of course. The military, football teams, fire fighters, beach rescue, virtually any entity that must react quickly and efficiently to disaster hones their responsiveness by running drills.
Netflix aggressively moves this strategy into the cloud by randomly failing servers using a tool they built called Chaos Monkey. The idea is:
If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.
They respond to failures by degrading service, but they always respond:
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