What We Learned at Chaos Carnival 2023

Updated

We're thrilled to report that our third annual chaos engineering conference, Chaos Carnival 2023, was a success. With over 1,800 attendees worldwide, Harness brought chaos engineering practitioners and leaders together to explore the latest trends and best practices.

The theme for the 2023 conference was "Build Resilience Through Chaos," which highlighted the importance of testing and proactively improving systems to prevent failures and enable innovation. The conference brought together a diverse group of attendees – including CTOs, engineers, developers, industry experts, and analysts – to share their chaos engineering experiences and ideas.

Over two full days, attendees had the opportunity to participate in 25+ interactive talks, breakout sessions, technical workshops, and panel discussions. The event featured four keynote presentations from some of the most prominent thought leaders in the industry, including:

Adrian Hornsby, Principal System Dev Engineer, AWS
Uma Mukkara, Head of Chaos Engineering, Harness
Adrian Cockroft, Tech Advisor, Harness
Karthik Satchitanand, Principal Engineer, Harness

You can watch all the keynotes and technical sessions on the Chaos Carnival YouTube channel.
Watch Day 1 | Watch Day 2

Key Takeaways From Chaos Carnival 2023

One of the most important lessons learned at Chaos Carnival 2023 is the critical role that chaos engineering plays in enabling developers to focus on innovation rather than the distractions of system failures. By building resilient systems that can withstand unexpected failures and disruptions, organizations can free up resources and energy for more innovative pursuits.

Here are some other top takeaways:

Chaos engineering is experiencing exponential growth as more and more organizations recognize the importance of building resilient systems that can withstand unexpected failures and disruptions.
Documenting Chaos Engineering exercises is essential to capture best practices in your organization.
Shift-left reliability and resiliency testing are needed across the entire software delivery lifecycle, from developers to site reliability engineers (SRE).
Continuous resilience (introducing fault injections in the developer continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline) is critical for enterprises.
The emergence of new tools and techniques that are helping organizations test and proactively improve their systems without compromising reliability or resilience.
Security chaos engineering allows users to test their security posture by running experiments that validate or invalidate security control access.
Community and collaboration in the chaos engineering space are invaluable.

Continuing the Chaos Conversations and Learning

We encourage all attendees and readers to continue learning by exploring techniques discussed at Chaos Carnival, joining the vibrant chaos engineering slack community, and sharing their expertise with colleagues.

Community contributions and feedback play an important role in successful chaos engineering, particularly for cloud-native ecosystems. Continue the chaos conversation by connecting with the sponsors, keynote speakers, and attendees on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Slack. Networking allows us all to advance the chaos industry, learn about future events, and share thoughts with this community that is passionate for building resilience.

We want to thank all of the attendees, speakers, sponsors, and organizers who made Chaos Carnival 2023 such a success. We look forward to seeing you all at future events and continuing the conversation about how we can build resilient systems that enable innovation and growth.

Special thanks to our sponsors, Nagarro, Blameless, Grafana Labs, k6, Civo, Conf42, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Elastic, Litmus Community, Poools, Solid.jobs, and DevIT.