For Kolton Andrus, CEO and co-founder, Gremlin, describing what chaos engineering is “is one of my favorite topics for debate,” and “is what makes chaos engineering sound fun and exciting."

In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, Andrus, in addition to defining chaos engineering, describes how organizations can make it work for them. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, hosted this episode.

The very idea of chaos — and an IT organization’s embrace of it — can conjure up fear in many. “[Chaos engineering] scares the pants off of some old school folks that aren’t comfortable with that kind of chaos in their environments. And so most people think chaos engineering is randomly breaking things and seeing what happens,” said Andrus. “I think that chaos engineering is thoughtful, planned experiments that teach us about our system and one of the key concepts that goes with that is this idea of the ‘blast radius.’ When we run this experiment, whom might we impact? Because the goal is to prevent outages, not to cause an outage and we never want to inadvertently cause customer pain. We never want to cause an outage because we were being cavalier in our approach.”