Quickstart

This section will show how to deploy an initial Chaos Monkey Engine in a few minutes to test its functionality.

Chaos Monkey Engine

Chaos Monkey Engine helps you planning and executing attacks against any infrastructure. This helps you detecting possible improvements in the mission of building an antifragile infrastructure.

Requirements

• Docker 1.12+

• Amazon Web Services credentials in environment variables:

  • AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
  • AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
  • AWS_DEFAULT_REGION

Get your engine up and running

Build and run the Docker container:

docker build -t chaos-monkey-engine .
docker run --rm -p 5000:5000 -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY -e AWS_DEFAULT_REGION -ti chaos-monkey-engine

The Chaos Monkey Engine should be now listening in port 5000 TCP and ready to attack the machines in your AWS infrastructure.

Schedule a simple attack

Create a plan file (plan.json) with a content similar to this one:

{
    "name": "Terminate random running instance",
    "attack": {
        "ref": "terminate_ec2_instance:TerminateEC2Instance",
        "args": {
            "filters": {
                "instance-state-name":"running"
            }
        }
    },
    "planner": {
        "args": {
            "min_time": "10:00",
            "max_time": "18:00",
            "times": 3
        },
    "ref": "simple_planner:SimplePlanner"
    }
}

This plan schedules 3 attacks between 10:00 and 18:00 that terminate running EC2 instances of the region selected with AWS_DEFAULT_REGION. You can use filters as described in the official AWS documentation.

Send the plan to the engine:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d @plan.json localhost:5000/api/1/plans/

Once the plan has been executed and the attack executors are created, you can check them issuing the following request:

curl localhost:5000/api/1/executors/

Monitoring the output of the Chaos Monkey Engine, you will see the resulting executions.