Chaos Monkey is a chaos engineering tool designed to verify the resilience of distributed systems by intentionally terminating production instances. It functions as a fault injection service that identifies weaknesses in cloud-based architectures by simulating real-world hardware and software outages.
The platform operates through a centralized orchestration engine that executes periodic disruption cycles based on predefined configuration rules. It employs a rule-based selection process that evaluates instance metadata against safety constraints to ensure that only eligible targets are disrupted, while a persistent data store tracks execution history to prevent excessive system instability.
The system integrates with cloud environments through a plugin-based abstraction layer that translates generic termination commands into provider-specific API calls. It monitors infrastructure lifecycle events to ensure that disruption actions remain aligned with current service health and deployment status, supporting automated site reliability engineering workflows.
