Out of chaos, order: How Microsoft Azure customers are beginning to use Azure Chaos Studio

At Microsoft Ignite in November 2021, Microsoft debuted Azure Chaos Studio as a managed service in public preview. Described as a “fully managed experimentation platform,” Chaos Studio gives customers a chance to intentionally disrupt apps to spot and mitigate potential issues.

For example, Chaos Studio may observe how apps will respond against real-world disruptions such as network latency, unexpected storage outages, secrets expiring, or a full datacenter outage. With Chaos Studio, Microsoft intends to support customer application resiliency goals, continuous validation, and experimentation with a library of agent- and service-based faults.

According to Steven Walker, CEO of Spylix, Chaos Studio is significant for the ways that it can help customers to increase reliability. Currently, his company uses Chaos Studio to gain insights into potential application faults that could hamper performance in the future. Spylix offers apps for parental controls and employee monitoring. So far, Walker said it has improved the performance of his company’s app.

Intentional introduction of disrupts in your apps helps you figure out solutions to the faults and implement strategies to make educated decisions. Hence increased reliability… Azure Chaos Studio has seen significant uptake. Customers have embraced it due to its capability to help them develop reliable and trustworthy applications.

He added:

Sometimes there would be failures arising in [our] application. Before building an application, we use Chaos Studio to measure and understand the application, so that we can quickly rectify the errors that come later.

Neil John, a software engineer and principal at One Computer Guy, sees the need to increase fault tolerance across Azure-hosted apps, or apps newly migrated to the cloud.