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released
May 18, 2023
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3
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Highlights from LitmusChaos at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Updated

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF’s) flagship conference was hosted in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on April 18-21 and brought together thousands of attendees from around the world to share insights and innovations as well as discuss the future of cloud native computing. Harness is a silver sponsor of KubeCon and supports LitmusChaos, the CNCF incubating project for cloud-native chaos engineering, after donating the project to the CNCF through the acquisition of ChaosNative in 2022. 

KubeCon is central to growing the cloud native computing community. Harness is not only contributing to LitmusChaos but growing the community through events, conferences, and teaching others how to contribute. As shared in an interview with Parth Goswami, “A contributor is only a contributor when they can bring in [others]...to the project.” 

In Amsterdam, the event presented keynotes from some of the biggest names in the cloud native industry, such as the welcome keynote from Priyanka Sharma and Chris Aniszczyk as well as Petter Sveum’s keynote on data protection on application recovery and data protection. KubeCon also hosted  a project pavilion to showcase CNCF projects. 

This year, LitmusChaos also offered a series of technical education sessions about best practices on chaos engineering and resiliency. Speakers also shared chaos engineering updates, demos, and much more on the LitmusChaos project with the attendees. Here’s a rundown of the highlights featuring LitmusChaos from this year’s conference.

LitmusChaos Project Meeting

The LitmusChaos Project Meeting kicked off the journey at KubeCon this year with more than 30 attendees from numerous industries. At the meeting, Uma Mukkara, maintainer for LitmusChaos and head of Chaos Engineering at Harness, introduced the concept of chaos engineering, its history, and how to build chaos engineering culture in organizations. Uma then introduced the LitmusChaos tool and its background before concluding with a brief explanation of all the project’s live features and how the community can utilize them to kickstart their chaos engineering journey. “LitmusChaos usage in large enterprises…shows that chaos engineering adoption is going to the next level,” Mukkara said “KubeCon has provided us with the required insights into the next requirements for the Litmus project, and Litmus 3.0 will focus on making chaos easy for developers.”

Mukkara’s presentation was followed by a demo showing how to inject chaos experiments on a sample e-commerce application, alongside multiple chaos scenarios that can be curated using Litmus. Co-maintainer Raj Das led a deeper dive into the project, shedding light on how to create new chaos experiments, how the LitmusChaos architecture is designed, and the principles of GitOps for chaos engineering. Following the presentations, attendees were invited to ask maintainers questions about LitmusChaos in an interactive Q&A.

The LitmusChaos Booth

The LitmusChaos team spent the majority of the conference at the LitmusChaos helping new CNCF community members learn about cloud-native chaos engineering, how to get started, and how to contribute back to the community.  Based on the insightful conversations and feedback from the community, it was clear that developer interest in chaos engineering has grown significantly. Now, many large enterprises view it as critical for their resiliency goals. Furthermore, as most chaos experiments are run on Kubernetes systems, chaos engineering adoption will significantly grow alongside the adoption of Kubernetes. 

In a podcast interview with Software Engineering Daily, Mukkara described how a user can get started with a simple Kubernetes pod-delete chaos experiment to validate how software failures impact the customer experience. 

LitmusChaos Maintainer Track

The Maintainer Track talks are an opportunity for maintainers from various projects to cover multiple aspects of the project alongside the journey, features, adoption, roadmap, and use cases.

This year, the LitmusChaos maintainers answered questions from the community based on security challenges that come up with the chaos engineering practice. Specifically, they discussed injecting faults to simulate real-world events and how this necessitates privileged execution modes, which are often considered risky and against the best practices advocated by security specialists. However, as shared by Mukkara and Das, there are multiple ways to mitigate this challenge and leverage the benefits of chaos testing  with careful planning and appropriate configuration. 

The talk began with LitmusChaos project updates and a quick introduction to chaos engineering. The remainder of the session discussed security considerations for chaos engineering, including user authentication, fault-blacklisting for platform resources (services as well as cloud infrastructure), runtime security for containers, integration with policy engines, and secrets management. The session concluded with a quick introduction to a host of new features and capabilities in the LitmusChaos 3.0 beta release. Check out the recording of the full session on Youtube. 

CNCF Project Announcement

For LitmusChaos, KubeCon is both a celebration of chaos engineering and an opportunity to announce project developments to the community. The LitmusChaos community announced new features with LitmusChaos 3.0 Beta to make the platform more robust and developer-friendly, with a target to go GA by KubeCon North America 2023 in November.

Check out the full announcement on the CNCF blog.

Conclusion 

The LitmusChaos project has been participating in KubeCons for five years, and community participation always amazes us. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe was no exception. 

Interested in learning more or getting involved?  Join our community by:

We are looking forward to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America at Chicago, Illinois on November 6-9, 2023 and hope to see you there! 

Start Improving Software Reliability Today with Harness Chaos Engineering

Harness recognizes that enterprises need to move fast and scale quickly to meet the demands of their business, so we offer enterprise support to ensure your chaos engineering practice can begin as quickly and safely as possible. Harness Chaos Engineering (CE) was built by the same team of experts that created the CNCF open-source project, LitmusChaos. The Harness CE team is ready to support SaaS, on-premises, self-hosted, or air-gapped installations and provide onboarding assistance, feature enhancements, chaos best practices, and custom tooling integration for CI/CD and observability platforms.

Getting started with chaos engineering has never been so simple. If you are ready to see how your organization can adopt this practice and improve reliability, request a demo and sign up for the SaaS trial today!

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Chaos Engineering