Create Chaos Mesh Workflow

    To meet this need, Chaos Mesh provided Chaos Mesh Workflow, a built-in workflow engine. Using this engine, you can run different Chaos experiments in serial or parallel to simulate production-level errors.

    Currently, Chaos Mesh Workflow supports the following features:

    • Serial Orchestration
    • Parallel Orchestration
    • Conditional branch

    Typical user scenarios:

    • Use parallel orchestration to inject multiple NetworkChaos faults to simulate complex web environments.
    • Use serial orchestration to perform health checks and use the conditional branch to determine whether to perform the remaining steps.

    The design of Chaos Mesh Workflow is, to some extent, inspired by Argo Workflows. If you are familiar with Argo Workflows, you can also quickly get started with Chaos Mesh Workflow.

    More workflow examples are available in the Chaos Mesh GitHub repository.

    Create a workflow using a YAML file from the network:

    A simple workflow YAML file is defined as follows. In this workflow, StressChaos, NetworkChaos, and PodChaos are injected:

    In the above YAML template, the templates fields define the steps of the experiment. The entry field defines the entry of the workflow when the workflow is being executed.

    Each element in templates represents a workflow step. For example:

    templateType: Parallel means that the node type is parallel. deadline: 240s means that all parallel experiments on this node are expected to be performed in 240 seconds; otherwise, the experiments time out. children means the other template names to be executed in parallel.

    templateType: PodChaos means that the node type is PodChaos experiments. means that the current Chaos experiment lasts for 40 seconds. podChaos is the definition of the PodChaos experiment.

    It is flexible to create a workflow using a YAML file and kubectl. You can nest parallel or serial orchestrations to declare complex orchestrations, and even combine the orchestration with conditional branches to achieve a circular effect.

    note

    When creating a Chaos with a duration in the workflow, you need to fill the duration in the outer deadline field instead of using the duration field in Chaos.

    Currently, two context variables are provided in expression:

    • exitCode means the exit code for a customized task.
    • stdout indicates the standard output for a customized task.

    The following table only lists the commonly used fields. For the definitions of more fields, see Kubernetes documentation - core1.Container.