chaos-gamedaylisted

# Chaos game day A runbook nobody has followed under pressure is a guess, and an alert that has never fired in anger is a hope. A game day turns both into evidence by breaking something deliberately while you watch, ready to stop. Run it without rails and you cause the outage you meant to prevent; run it as a demo where everyone knows the answer and it teaches nothing. The craft lives between those two. ## Method 1. **Open with a falsifiable hypothesis tied to a real fear.** Write a prediction: "if the primary database fails over, reads recover inside 30 seconds and no page reaches a human." Pick failures you genuinely worry about, dependency timeouts, zone loss, a poisoned cache, a full disk, not the ones you already know you survive. 2. **Define steady state and the abort condition before anything breaks.** Name the health metric (checkout success rate, p99 latency) and the exact threshold that ends the exercise on the spot. Fix the blast radius up front: one shard, one zone, one percent of traffic. No fault is injected until the kill switch is built and tested. 3. **Assign roles and keep the responders blind.** A facilitator drives the scenario and holds the abort switch, a scribe timestamps every event, and the on-call responders work the problem without the injection details. If the people responding already know the answer, you are measuring their memory, not the system. 4. **Announce the window; do not ambush.** Tell the wider org