Chaos Monkey

What Does Chaos Monkey Mean?

Chaos Monkey is part of the Simian Army, which is a collection of developer tools, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides for more fault tolerant network setups.

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Techopedia Explains Chaos Monkey

The idea behind Chaos Monkey is that frequent failures cause developers to make systems much more fault tolerant than normal. However, some in the field have expressed frustration with Chaos Monkey’s arbitrary termination of processes and situations that involve thorough diagnosis in order to identify Chaos Monkey behavior.

When systems are hit by Chaos Monkey, administrators lacking an understanding of the program’s functionality may spend a great deal of time reviewing other elements, like network virtualization systems, drivers, hardware, cabling and connection protocols. This is considered either "wasted time" or necessary research and troubleshooting. However, development teams may elect to use Chaos Monkey in order to promote discipline and encourage agile responses to arbitrary and unprecedented issues.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…