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LitmusChaos at Kubecon EU '21

Karthik Satchitanand

Karthik Satchitanand

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19th May 2021

7 Minute Read

LitmusChaos at Kubecon EU '21

KubeCon is veritably a festival for the tech community nowadays, and this is a sentiment that I have expressed several times before, but cannot tire of repeating! The sheer diversity of content (organized into a neat set of tracks), the announcements & launches, predictions, and panel discussions, all add to the excitement. I even managed to get my young nephew interested in the Cloud Native world by ordering the Phippy & friends buildable set with my Speaker giveaway!

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For us, as members of the LitmusChaos project & the broader cloud native chaos engineering community, this edition of Kubecon EU '21 turned out to be sweeter still.

The predictions made ahead of the event by Cheryl Hung, VP, Ecosystem at CNCF, where she noted the growing interest in chaos, set the ball rolling (and this came on the back of similar observations made by Liz Rice, the chair of CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee (ToC) at the November 2020 Kubecon):

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This added to the organic interest that Litmus as a project has gathered in the CNCF community, and resulted in some wonderful responses to the various presentations/talks that it featured in. All this led to newer slack members, appreciative messages from those that grokked the project, more questions on what’s coming & roadmap, quick feedback from folks that tried it, and some cool issues and PRs in the process!

In this blog post, let us do a quick round-up of the talks/sessions where Litmus “appeared”. Some of the perspectives expressed are instructive and definitely hold value for us at the project. I have also tried to capture all the buzz (via tweets, of course) around Litmus and provide links to the awesome presentations around the project.

The Round-Up

First up, was the whirlwind sandbox projects tour by Justin Cormack, CTO, Docker, where he introduced Litmus as a way to package & perform your own custom chaos experiments. The talk prompted some awesome cloud-native advocates & tech-gurus to recall some deep dives on the project that had been performed in recent times!

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Our KubeCon talk, on Putting Chaos into Continuous Delivery to increase Application resilience along with the fantastic team at Keptn, was well attended with many questions on the philosophy of automated chaos. For those interested, there is more coming on the integration with Keptn, including some very cool use cases around auto-remediation!

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Alois Reitbauer (https://twitter.com/AloisReitbauer), co-chair of the CNCF SIG-App Delivery, presented some interesting findings in this space, with Chaos Engineering & Litmus getting special mention. He discussed some common experimentation trends, and how organizations are embracing a shift left approach with chaos. And what better than validation of these thoughts from the experts at Gitlab!

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Next up was probably the most interesting demo (one that followed a nice intro/whiteboard session) involving litmus in the Kubecon. Saiyam (Civo) & Karthik (Verica) presented how one could leverage the GitOps & Event-triggered chaos features in the Litmus platform to test the sanity of the changes made to your application deployments on the cluster. It also had some cool takeaways on how you should approach chaos engineering & up your reliability game.

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In between the various talks, we had the opportunity to hold the Office Hours (thanks a ton to the CNCF for organizing this) where community members, first time users got a chance to learn about the project & the advanced ones to probe us on the roadmap :). What better than waking up to messages like this from folks that attended the office hours:

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Amidst all this, we had our SIG-Docs lead @Divya_Mohan02 participating in the awesome DoKC Day (Data on Kubernetes Community), where she shared her contribution journey in LitmusChaos, what it means to break things intentionally & how folks can get involved with the project.

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Looking Ahead

While we feel chaos engineering & LitmusChaos project’s approach towards it has been validated, there is much work to do & improve. The impending Litmus 2.0 launch is expected to improve the experience of users along with a host of useful features. Having said that, What are the aspects you are most interested in seeing Litmus get better at, features you’d like to include or integrations you’d like to see?

Feel free to get involved in these discussions on our slack channel or post your thoughts into the Github discussions !

Are you an SRE, developer, or a Kubernetes enthusiast? Does Chaos Engineering excite you? Join our community on Slack For detailed discussions & regular updates On Chaos Engineering For Kubernetes.

Check out the LitmusChaos GitHub repo and do share your feedback. Submit a pull request if you identify any necessary changes.

Chaos Engineering made easy

Litmus is highly extensible and integrates with other tools to enable the creation of custom experiments. Kubernetes developers & SREs use Litmus to manage chaos in a declarative manner and find weaknesses in their applications and infrastructure.

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