Run an Experiment
We will now use steadybit to design and run our first experiment. We focus in this guide on our example application of shopping demo, which you have optionally deployed following these steps here. However, you can also apply the steps to your own application.
We want to find out how our shopping demo behaves when one of the backend service can not be reached. Therefore, we simulate the unavailability of one container (
hot-deals) by isolating it on network level. This approach is less invasive than stopping it.To do that, we start by creating a new experiment via our Wizard, which guides us through every step:
Create experiment step 1
First step is to give our experiment a meaningful name and define the environment where to be executed. We choose the
Online Shop DEV environment to get access to everything steadybit has discovered for our demo online shop.
Create experiment step 2
Going to the next step, we can choose the attack. We want to simulate unavailability of the
hot-deals container by isolating it from others. Therefore, we choose the attack "blackhole" on network level.
Create experiment step 3
In the next step we can define our target. Since our target of our experiment is a container running in Kubernetes, we select Container by the attribute
k8s.container.name. Doing that, our experiment will be reusable even after container restarts.
Create experiment step 4
Last but not least: We can define how large our impact is. When having a scaled system you may want to start with a small attack radius first - affecting only one container and not all replicas.
Create experiment step 5
That's it, we can finalize the wizard by saving the experiment. You can now add additional attacks, checks and actions to the experiment or simply run our first experiment. Of course, we choose the fun part and run it immediately!
Create experiment step 6
Before running the experiment make sure to have the
/products-endpoint open in your browser. While running the experiment simply refresh it multiple times to check for effects.
Run experiment - system under test
When hitting the "run experiment"-button you see the steadybit execution window.
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Run experiment - execution window
You should notice that the
/products-endpoint will not work while hot-deals is unavailable. This is not desirable as there are other products which could have been browsed by the customers of the online shop. You can improve this behavior by adding appropriate fallbacks or scaling the services.You have now successfully run an experiment with steadybit in a Kubernetes environment. You have discovered the impact of an unavailable service in a non-scaled system.
What are the next steps?
You can extend the experiment by adding the HTTP action. This way, you see the availability of the
/product-endpoint directly in steadybit and don't need to check it manually.After that, how about scaling the
hot-deals service and then running your new experiment again to check increased resilience?kubectl scale deploy hot-deals --replicas=3 --namespace steadybit-demo
Verify by running:
kubectl get deployments -A
NAMESPACE NAME READY UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE
kube-system coredns 1/1 1 1 128d
steadybit-demo fashion-bestseller 1/1 1 3 1h49m
steadybit-demo gateway 1/1 1 1 1h49m
steadybit-demo hot-deals 3/3 3 3 1h49m
steadybit-demo postgres 1/1 1 1 1h49m
steadybit-demo toys-bestseller 1/1 1 1 1h49m
One big advantage is that you can re-run your experiment stored in Steadybit at any time.
Last modified 1mo ago