Chaos Engineering in the Wild: Findings from GitHub

TL;DR

This study analyzes 971 GitHub repositories to understand the adoption, usage patterns, and trends of chaos engineering tools, revealing their growth, primary applications, and fault types addressed in real-world projects.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of chaos engineering tool adoption and usage patterns in open-source repositories, highlighting industry trends and research gaps.

Findings

Toxiproxy and Chaos Mesh are the most used tools with increasing adoption.

Development repositories show higher activity, indicating industrial relevance.

Network disruptions and instance termination are the main fault scenarios addressed.

Abstract

Chaos engineering aims to improve the resilience of software systems by intentionally injecting faults to identify and address system weaknesses that cause outages in production environments. Although many tools for chaos engineering exist, their practical adoption is not yet explored. This study examines 971 GitHub repositories that incorporate 10 popular chaos engineering tools to identify patterns and trends in their use. The analysis reveals that Toxiproxy and Chaos Mesh are the most frequently used, showing consistent growth since 2016 and reflecting increasing adoption in cloud-native development. The release of new chaos engineering tools peaked in 2018, followed by a shift toward refinement and integration, with Chaos Mesh and LitmusChaos leading in ongoing development activity. Software development is the most frequent application (58.0%), followed by unclassified purposes (16.2%), teaching (10.3%), learning (9.9%), and research (5.7%). Development-focused repositories tend to have higher activity, particularly for Toxiproxy and Chaos Mesh, highlighting their industrial relevance. Fault injection scenarios mainly address network disruptions (40.9%) and instance termination (32.7%), while application-level faults remain underrepresented (3.0%), highlighting for future exploration.