What is chaos engineering and how does it relate to performance testing?
- chaos engineering
- resilience
- fault injection
Answer it first, then compare. Nothing here is saved or scored.
Model answer
Chaos engineering deliberately introduces failures to test system resilience: kill a service, introduce network latency, fill a disk, exhaust memory. Relation to performance: (1) Performance under failure, how does the system perform when a dependency is slow or down? (2) Failover performance, how quickly does the system recover? (3) Graceful degradation, does the system serve partial results or error completely? Tools: Chaos Monkey, Litmus, Gremlin, Toxiproxy. Start small: inject one failure at a time, in non-production, with monitoring in place. Graduate to production chaos as confidence grows.
What interviewers listen for
- Workload modellingYou design the load shape from product traffic, not from tool defaults.
- Percentile literacyYou read p50/p95/p99 separately and explain why each matters.
- Bottleneck triageYou correlate metrics across application, database, and infrastructure layers.
- Capacity instinctsYou can translate a soak test into a sizing or scaling recommendation.