Kube monkey

kube monkey is an implementation of Netflix’s chaos monkey for Kubernetes clusters. It schedules randomly killing of pods in order to test fault tolerance of a highly available system.

Why

As a part of our charts development we needed a way to test the fault tolerance of our deployments.

How

Using kube monkey is a manual step we do after our weekly demos. The intended use case of kube monkey is to kill pods randomly at random times during a working day to test the ability to recover. The way we use it is a bit different, we manually launch kube monkey in debug mode and manually identify the weak points of our deployment.

Later, we intend to integrate it into our CI pipeline, so whenever new changes are rolled out we have a kube monkey run for that release.

Configuration

Kube monkey can be configured by editing the scripts/kube-monkey-resources/km-config.toml file. For more info read the official kube monkey docs.

Usage

The gke_bootstrap_script.sh takes an argument chaos which installs and unleashes kube monkey by scheduling a run 60s after installing kube monkey by default. It also sets up the needed service account and role if RBAC is enabled.

After you clone the charts repository, to install and unleash kube monkey run: