Other Tools in the Simian Army

Aside from the well-known Chaos Monkey, the Netflix Simian Army includes many more “monkeys” who each serve a specific purpose in the company’s chaos engineering efforts:

1. Latency Monkey

• This tool is designed to simulate varying levels of network latency between services in the distributed system.
• It can introduce unpredictable delays, increased latency, or packet loss to simulate real-world network situations that may occur.
• This enables developers to test how their apps and services respond to degraded network performance, ensuring that they degrade gracefully rather than collapse disastrous.
• Latency Monkey contributes to the robustness and fault-tolerance of the overall distributed architecture.

2. Conformity Monkey

• This monkey ensures that all application instances use the correct software versions, configurations, and settings.
• This promotes consistency and prevents configuration errors or unapproved changes from entering the environment.
• Conformity Monkey interfaces with configuration management technologies to detect and rectify non-compliant instances.

3. Doctor Monkey

• This tool continuously examines the overall health and performance of the application stack.
• It monitors CPU/memory use, disk space, database connection pools, error rates, and other important parameters.
• Doctor Monkey analyzes this data to discover potential difficulties or bottlenecks before they become serious problems.
• When problems are recognized, Doctor Monkey can initiate automated corrective actions, such as scaling off resources or restarting troublesome programs.

4. Janitor Monkey

• This monkey is in charge of cleaning up any unused resources in the infrastructure.
• It discovers and safely removes idle compute instances, old data volumes, abandoned network resources, and so forth.
• This helps to maintain a lean, efficient infrastructure by reclaiming resources that are no longer required.
• Janitor Monkey runs on a regular schedule to manage the environment’s “housekeeping” proactively.

5. Security Monkey

• This software continuously examines the environment for security flaws or misconfigurations.
• It monitors open ports, user permissions, encryption settings, and suspicious activity patterns.
• Security Monkey works with the organization’s security tools and processes to identify possible concerns for investigation and resolution.
• This ensures that the environment maintains a strong security posture and that any security gaps are rapidly identified and addressed.

Ever wondered how Netflix keeps running smoothly, even when millions of people are streaming their favorite shows and movies at the same time? Well, part of the secret lies in something called the Netflix Simian Army. It’s like a team of digital monkeys that Netflix uses to find and fix problems before they cause big issues.