Every software company is a distributed system, and distributed systems fail in unexpected ways. 

This ever-present tendency for systems to fail has led to the rise of failure testing, otherwise known as chaos engineering. Chaos engineering involves the deliberate failure of subsystems within an overall system to ensure that the system itself can be resilient to these kinds of unexpected failures.

Peter Alvaro is a distributed systems researcher who has published papers on a range of subjects, including debugging, failure testing, databases, and programming languages. He works with both academia and industry. Peter joins the show to discuss his research topics and goals.