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Comment by tree666 | Hacker News Reader

Your article shows you put in a lot of work, and was written well. But... A few thoughts... Service Owners usually tend to design and build their systems in a way which allows them to understand and know how the system will behave under the worst conditions. It is not difficult to test these conditions either. A bash script utilizing curl will suffice.

If you have to use 'Chaos Engineering' to experiment your way into innovation, this is a sign you built your service wrong. What will Amazon Re-Invent next!? I am guess the wheel. Well written article though.

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I might be misunderstanding what you consider one, but in my experience a bash script driving curl is great for some types of API or front-end load testing.

However, it won't necessarily help you know how your system will behave if S3 kicks the bucket in us-east-1 (again), your image host for that super-cool Kubernetes cluster suddenly throttles you during a critical restart, or your other service of choice went down due to an expired certificate.

If you however mean to use it to perform a denial of service on an endpoint you don't own, you're more hard-core than I thought.

> Service Owners usually tend to design and build their systems in a way which allows them to understand and know how the system will behave under the worst conditions.

With you so far

> A bash script utilizing curl will suffice.

Lol hell no. Yes, AWS/amazon does require a "GameDay" before launching a service which will execute an mcm (managed change management) that's basically a runbook of (way more in depth and comprehensive way to test your service than a single bash script with curl), but chaos engineering is a great additive, additional verification mechanism that really helps with service outages.

How are you going to test a thundering herd with a bash script executing curl?

How many machines are you running this simple bash+curl script on anyway? Using a single node to generate requests isn't going to do much in testing a service's reliability.

Also, they literally did invent a wheel

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/the-wheel/

Is your bash script open or closed? [1]

How does a bash script simulate network failures, connectivity drops or a gray-failure in one of your dependencies? [2]

A lot of thought has been put into this domain. Dismissing that without understanding any of the complexities is just showing your ignorance.

[1] - https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/05/10/open-closed.html

[2] - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/fis/latest/userguide/fis-actions...

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