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Inspiring Client Confidence Through Chaos
Inspiring Client Confidence Through Chaos

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With accelerated digital transformation, consumers and corporations are looking for real-time services and support from their financial services providers. At the same time, the influx of microservices, distributed systems and cloud-native technologies have increased the complexities of software architecture. This puts greater accountability on providers of financial technology to develop platforms and systems that are reliable and scalable to meet changing client needs. Engineering teams need to take end-to-end ownership of their deliveries and enhance their velocity to ensure seamless operations for financial institutions, businesses, and the end users of their services.

Chaos engineering is the best way to test reliability and predictability in the fintech industry. It is a framework that allows validation of a software system’s confidence by inducing controlled chaos in the system infrastructure and applications through automation. It helps fintechs save costs, improve predictability of service levels, and elevate the client experience through the delivery of robust systems.

As part of the software development process, the principles of chaos engineering require products to be built swiftly, operate reliably, and fail safely. With this disciplined approach, engineers can reduce complexities to improve system reliability and deliver the high caliber experiences clients expect for their end users.

Deciphering the Chaos Mechanism

Chaos engineering begins by defining a steady state under a normal scenario. Then, it hypothesizes the system’s behavior during the chaos state. It performs ‘chaos’ experiments that reflect real world events like crashing servers, killing pods, network latencies, and so on - in a controlled manner through a set of automated scripts. And all these experiments are done in production or close to production environments. The system behavior is verified post chaos experiments and compared against expected behavior. This helps identify systemic weaknesses that can then be corrected to improve system resiliency.

Order through Chaos

Usually, system reliability testing practices are manual and time consuming. They are performed ad hoc, and often fail to simulate actual complex production failure scenarios. This can lead to issues being uncovered only after a system is in production. This is not ideal because resolving production issues is time consuming, can create high pressure situations and is invariably expensive.

Chaos engineering offers an option to proactively identify and address real-world vulnerabilities. This helps ensure the creation of more resilient systems, mitigating the impact of any issue and saving costs in the production phase.

Managing Governance, Risk and Compliance

Reliable systems that ensure seamless and round-the-clock availability are one of the most critical elements of the financial services industry.  Financial institutions, businesses and end users need trustworthy and dependable systems that operate on pre-determined service level agreements.

Chaos engineering offers an opportunity for “intentional experimentation”, proactively allowing developers to test vulnerabilities and identify potential failures. With such power to identify gaps and predict failures, fintechs now have a chance to offer resilient, stable, and scalable infrastructure that meets client’s dynamic demands, enhances user experience, and helps ensure compliance to service levels in a holistic manner.

If chaos testing is standardised and incorporated as part of the software engineering process, it can significantly contribute to eliminating or minimising production outages. It allows developers to run more experiments, mitigate risk and improve the reliability of their systems, leaving more time for innovation.

Author:  Girish Narasimha Raghavan, Vice President – Engineering, Global Services, Fiserv


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