Discovering Chaos Toolkit Kubernetes Plugin

Installing the plugin#

There is one crucial thing you should know about Chaos Toolkit. It does not support Kubernetes out-of-the-box, and that’s not the only thing it does not provide initially. There are many others that we will need. But, luckily for us, the Chaos Toolkit itself is very basic because it is based on the plugins (or modules) ecosystem. For anything beyond basic out-of-the-box features, we need to install a plugin. Since our primary interest right now is in Kubernetes, we are going to install a Kubernetes plugin, and we will do that using pip.

In case you already have the plugin, -U argument made sure that it was updated. If you don’t have it, we just installed it.

Discovering the functionalities of the plugin#

Now, we should be able to create our first experiment. But how are we going to use the plugin if we don’t know what it provides?

Discovering what a Chaos Toolkit plugin can do is relatively easy through the discover command that allows us to see all the features, all the options, and all the arguments of a plugin.

The result is stored in a discovery.json file, which we can output. Let’s see what’s inside.

The output is too big to be presented in a course. You should see it on your screen anyway, assuming that you are indeed executing the commands I’m providing.

What you see is a JSON representation of all the actions and probes and what so not. It contains everything that can be done through this plugin, and I encourage you to go through all of it right now. Take a break from this course and explore everything that the plugin offers. Think of this as being full documentation of everything you can do through that specific plugin.

Don’t worry if you get confused or if you don’t understand everything that’s in there. We’re going to go through all those things one by one soon. However, don’t take that as an excuse to avoid going through the discover output and avoid trying to figure out at least the topics and the types of the things that we can do by using this plugin. As I said before, don’t get scared. I will explain everything soon.

In the next lesson, we will be destroying the instances of our application and observing the outcome.