Chaos Engineer
Designs controlled failure experiments — from a single fault injection to a full game day — and produces the runbook, rollback plan.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
Designing chaos experiments is a good way to test how resilient your system is to failures. The basic idea is to introduce failures in a controlled way and see how your system responds. You might experiment with things like taking down a service, increasing latency, or simulating a database failure. You'd want to define what you're trying to learn, set up the experiment carefully so you can control the failure, observe what happens, and then have a rollback plan in case things go wrong. You should probably start with smaller, lower-risk experiments and work your way up to more severe scenarios. If you can tell me about your system architecture and what failure scenarios you're most concerned about, I can help you design a specific experiment.
CHAOS EXPERIMENT DESIGN: API LATENCY INJECTION EXPERIMENT OBJECTIVE Test: How does the system handle when payment-processing API responds in 5 seconds instead of 200ms? Success criteria: Orders queue instead of failing; no 500 errors; recovery within 30 seconds of latency removal EXPERIMENT MANIFEST Title: Payment API Degradation Timing: Tuesday 2pm UTC (low-traffic window, not Friday evening) Duration: 10 minutes (bounded blast radius) Target service: Payment processor (East region first) FAILURE INJECTION MECHANISM Tool: Chaos Monkey (Netflix; inject latency via proxy) Configuration: Service: paymentgateway-api Failure type: Network latency Latency added: 4.8 seconds (5s total response time) Percentage: 100% (all payment calls) Region: us-east-1 (primary only, not backup) METRICS TO MONITOR (Real-time dashboard) • Payment success rate (target: stays > 90%) • API response time p99 (expect: 5+ seconds during experiment) • Order queue depth (should increase, then drain after recovery) • Error rate (target: stays < 1%) • Customer-facing latency (web checkout time) BLAST RADIUS ASSESSMENT • Blast radius: Payment flow only; checkout page slows but doesn't error • Customers impacted: Checkout users during 10-min window (est. 1-2K transactions) • Critical risk: If queue overflows -> orders lost (MITIGATED by queue monitoring) ROLLBACK PROCEDURE Manual kill-switch: Kill chaos experiment pod (1 minute to recover) Automatic rollback: If order queue > 5K, abort experiment (prevents cascade) Verification: Confirm payment success rate > 95% within 2 min of rollback POST-MORTEM TEMPLATE • What we learned: System handles graceful degradation; queue strategy works • Gaps identified: Alerts triggered late (should alert at queue 1K) • Follow-up: Add health-check endpoint for payment queue depth • Next experiment: Test database failover (higher risk, requires pre-approval)
About this skill
name: chaos-engineer description: Use when Designs chaos experiments, creates failure injection frameworks, and facilitates game day exercises for distributed systems — producing runbooks, experiment manifests, rollback procedures, and post...
Chaos Engineer
Designs chaos experiments, creates failure injection frameworks, and facilitates game day exercises for distributed systems — producing runbooks, experiment manifests, rollback procedures, and post-mortem templates. Use when designing chaos experiments, implementing failure injection frameworks, or conducting game day exercises. Invoke for chaos experiments, resilience testing, blast radius control, game days, antifragile systems, fault injection, Chaos Monkey, Litmus Chaos.
What you get
- Public GitHub repo
- the skills/chaos-engineer folder with SKILL.md and references.
Customize your output
- Fork the repo and extend the skill's reference files for your own stack conventions.
Example output
Activates on a matching request (e.g. building or reviewing Chaos Engineer code) and can chain with other skills in the pack.
Best for
Full-stack developers and engineering teams using Claude Code.
SKILL.md preview
---
name: chaos-engineer
description: Designs chaos experiments, creates failure injection frameworks, and facilitates game day exercises for distributed systems.
version: 1.0.0
category: Development / DevOps & Infra
author: AgentVolt
license: proprietary
tags:
- development
- devops-infra
---
# Chaos Engineer
Designs controlled failure experiments — from a single fault injection to a full game day — and produces the runbook, rollback plan, and post-mortem template that make it safe to run.
## When to use
… (sign up to view the full skill)More development skills
View all Development skills →Devops Engineer
Creates Dockerfiles, configures CI/CD pipelines, writes Kubernetes manifests, and generates Terraform/Pulumi infrastructure templates.
Cloud Architect
Designs cloud architectures, creates migration plans, generates cost optimization recommendations, and produces disaster recovery strategies across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Sre Engineer
Defines service level objectives, creates error budget policies, designs incident response procedures, develops capacity models.
Monitoring Expert
Configures monitoring systems, implements structured logging pipelines, creates Prometheus/Grafana dashboards, defines alerting rules, and instruments distributed tracing.