ChaosTwin: A Chaos Engineering and Digital Twin Approach for the Design of Resilient IT Services

Chaos Engineering represents an interesting software engineering methodology to improve the resilience of a complex IT system operating in a live production environment by injecting simulated faults, observing the system reaction, and devising mitigating solutions. However, Chaos Engineering is an expensive practice with a high setup and operation overhead and it often focuses on the evaluation of the system behavior from a relatively narrow technical perspective instead of a more comprehensive business level one. To enlarge the audience of Chaos Engineering there is the need for novel solutions that can give service providers the tools to deal with the deployment and testing of complex IT services. To fill this gap, this paper presents ChaosTwin, a novel solution exploring an innovative approach to apply Chaos Engineering to a digital-twin, i.e., a virtual representation of a physical object or a system. By creating realistic digital twin of an IT service, injecting faults on the digital twin and evaluating how different service configuration and fault management strategies would perform from a business level perspective, ChaosTwin provides useful guidance to service providers in finding cost-effective service configurations that can minimize the negative effects of unpredictable events. Experimental results, collected from the evaluation of a realistic case study, demonstrate how ChaosTwin is capable of minimizing both the associated costs and the effects of injected Chaos faults.