Extending Chaos Engineering: How Steadybit Extensions Work
Chaos engineering requires control, flexibility, and deep insights into how systems respond under stress. Steadybit extensions make this possible.
Chaos engineering requires control, flexibility, and deep insights into how systems respond under stress. Steadybit extensions make this possible. They connect Steadybit's control plane with specific technologies, enabling precise fault injection and better observability integration.
What is an Extension?
An extension is a purpose-built component for a particular technology. On one side, there's Steadybit's control plane, the central hub for chaos engineering operations. On the other side, extensions interact with and manipulate specific environments.
Steadybit provides a catalog of extensions for various technologies. Testing Kubernetes resilience? The Kubernetes extension discovers your clusters, while the container extension enables attacks like crash loops, latency injection, and pod disruptions.
Here’s a video showing this process:
Running workloads on AWS? The AWS extension simulates cloud failures at the infrastructure level. Need to test individual machines? The host extension lets you stress-test hosts.
Extensions for Monitoring and Observability
Understanding how failures impact systems requires solid observability. That’s why Steadybit integrates with monitoring solutions like Datadog, Dynatrace, Instana, and New Relic. These extensions allow teams to correlate chaos experiments with real-time observability data, validate assumptions, detect bottlenecks, and improve incident response.
Build Your Own Extension - Extension Kits
Every environment has unique requirements, and sometimes, an off-the-shelf extension won’t cut it. Steadybit provides an SDK for building custom extensions. Whether you prefer Go, Java, Python, or another language, you can create an extension that connects to Steadybit’s API and integrates into your stack.
The process is simple:
Follow the provided SDK instructions.
Develop your extension in your preferred language.
Connect it to Steadybit’s control plane.
Run controlled experiments tailored to your environment.
A Growing Ecosystem
Steadybit's open-source approach keeps the extension ecosystem growing. Whether you're using existing extensions or building your own, you can make chaos engineering fit your environment.
Explore the catalog and get started today.