The Chaos Monkey originated with Netflix, who built a Chaos Monkey in order to test that they can consistently handle failure. Partly because of its name and partly because the idea of randomly terminating production servers is an absurd check of fault tolerate architectures, the Chaos Monkey concept took a life of its own and has become part of AWS legend. Werner Vogels even kicked off a t-shirt design contest.
This is a .NET implementation of the Chaos Monkey that randomly chooses from tagged instances at an endpoint (eg. US, EU etc). The application is a simple console executable that uses the AWS .NET API and has various options available, as listed below:
-a, --awsaccesskey=VALUE Access key of AWS IAM user that can list and terminate instances
-d, --delay=VALUE Delay (milliseconds) before chaos is unleashed again (if repeat option set)
-D, --acceptdisclaimer Chaos Monkey is designed to break stuff, setting this option means that you acknowledge this
-e, --endpoint=VALUE AWS endpoint name (US-East, US-West, EU, Asia-Pacific-Singapore, Asia-Pacific-Japan)
-h, -?, --help Show help (this screen)
-i, --loadsettings=VALUE Load settings xml file
-l, --log=VALUE Save log to file
-o, --savesettings=VALUE Save settings to xml file
-r, --repeat=VALUE Number of times chaos is unleashed (default 1)
-s, --awssecretkey=VALUE Access key of AWS IAM user that can list and terminate instances
-S, --serviceurl=VALUE URL of EC2 service endpoint (use e|endpoint to use defaults)
-t, --tagkey=VALUE Key of Tag that will be search for in instances e.g. if EC2 tag is chaos=1, ChaosMonkey -t=chaos -v=1
-v, --tagvalue=VALUE Value of Tag that will be search for in instances e.g. if EC2 tag is chaos=1, ChaosMonkey -v=1 -t=chaos
The screenshot below illustrates how it runs.
To install, you can download the binaries, extract the zip file and run ChaosMonkey.exe
DISCLAIMER
By design, the Chaos Monkey terminates servers randomly and without prejudice. Nobody can accept any responsibility if you use the Chaos Monkey to shoot yourself in the foot.