Resiliency is key to software nowadays. It contributes to your application's reliability and plays a major role in the competitive advantage of your business. Resilient applications smartly exploit the strengths of software patterns that handle timeouts, delays and faulty service responses.
Great authors and presenters like Uwe Friedrichsen and Donald Firesmith share their ideas and knowledge about resilient software design. Such articles describe software patterns that overcome disruptions and improve application resiliency in a handsome way.
However, deploying a resilience pattern requires you as a developer to verify your implementation. When touching the ground of verification, things appear to get difficult.
Chaos engineering tools advertise features like stopping a virtual machine, or to terminate pods in your Kubernetes cluster. The "blast radius" gets high here. Higher than a developer expects when exploring a resilience design pattern on Friday afternoon at 2PM.
That is where the Chaos Middleware
package goes into action. The Cloud Bug Study states, that neglected error handling - buggy code, timeouts, and others - leads to a great portion of a system's unavailability.
The Chaos Middleware
allows you to throw your application at turbulent conditions. It lets you simulate delayed responses or raise errors. Activate disruptions when needed and narrow them down on specific URL paths. The Chaos Middleware
gives you the opportunity to minimize the "blast radius" and verify your application's resilience, even on a Friday afternoon.
The next sections will guide you through i) the installation and configuration process in your Flask application ii) and the simulation of delays and application faults. Simulations are enabled by HTTP header requests or by the Chaos Platform
control panel.
Installation & configuration
-
Install the
Chaos Middleware
for the Flask application:
cd /path/to/your/flask-application # Enter your Flask application venv/bin/activate # Active virtual environment pip install -U proofdock-chaos-middleware-flask
-
Configure the Flask application:
from flask import Flask, jsonify from pdchaos.middleware.contrib.flask.flask_middleware import FlaskMiddleware app = Flask(__name__) app.config['CHAOS_MIDDLEWARE_APPLICATION_NAME'] = 'example-application-name' app.config['CHAOS_MIDDLEWARE_APPLICATION_ENV'] = 'example-environment' app.config['CHAOS_MIDDLEWARE_PROOFDOCK_API_TOKEN'] = 'eyJ0eXAi...05' middleware = FlaskMiddleware(app) # Your business logic here @app.route("/products") def hello(): return "Hello, from the products" if __name__ == "__main__": app.run()
Start your application
Simulate delays
Trigger delays by setting the x-proofdock-attack
request header. The Chaos Middleware
detects any value inside this header.
Set the header's value to {"actions":[{"name":"delay","value":"15"}]}
. The value describes the simulation name
and its value
in seconds. The described simulation delays the response by 15 seconds.
For the simulation, we use the Postman client to visualize the HTTP requests.
Simulate faults
Raise exceptions by setting the x-proofdock-attack
request header.
Set the header's value to {"actions":[{"name":"fault","value":"Exception"}]}
. The value describes the simulation name
and its value
as a fully qualified name of the exception to be raised. The simulation will raise the Exception
.
A control panel for Azure DevOps users
A more appealing way to control such attacks is the usage of the control panel provided by Proofdock's Chaos Platform
. The Chaos Platform
extends the Azure DevOps with chaos engineering capabilities. The control panel allows you to control application attacks via a graphical user interface and lets your application cache the configured attack. Check out the docs when you are interested in the Chaos Platform
.
The control panel in Azure DevOps
Thank you
We hope you had fun and learned some new aspects on resilience.
We are Proofdock, a software tech company located in Germany helping engineers build more resilient and reliable software products. Check out the Chaos Platform for Microsoft Azure and explore your system.
References
- Check out the source code at GitHub
- Read the docs
- Install the
Chaos Platform
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