Chaos Engineering is often misunderstood as simply “breaking things on purpose.” This talk challenges that perception and repositions Chaos Engineering as a critical pillar of reliability and resilience engineering. Rather than focusing on failure injection alone, we explore how to leverage existing knowledge, validate known truths, and foster confidence in complex systems.
In the first part, we deconstruct common myths around Chaos Engineering and reframe its core principles. Learn how aligning chaos practices with reliability goals can transform the way your organization perceives and applies these techniques—by emphasizing structured validation over blind experimentation.
The second part brings theory into practice with a hands-on framework that reimagines chaos experiments as self-feeding, iterative loops—mirroring the scientific method. We introduce the concept of continuous verification, drawing parallels with integration testing, and show how Chaos Engineering can seamlessly integrate into the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) through a shift-left approach.
The session wraps up with a visual framework for implementing a sustainable Chaos Engineering strategy, including how to evolve gamedays into repeatable, hypothesis-driven validations that scale with system changes.
Whether you're just exploring Chaos Engineering or looking to mature your reliability strategy, this talk will leave you with actionable insights, a modernized mindset, and a clear path to operational resilience.
I am a software engineer with an attrition for low-level and Linux internals who joined Datadog 7 years ago in the SRE group. After developing the now open-source Chaos Controller project meant to provide large-scale fault injection to engineering teams, I built the Security Chaos Engineering group now made of 3 teams and 20 people for which I act as the Engineering Manager. I am also part of the Core Incident Commanders group involved in all high severity outages to help with internal coordination and external communication.
