Declarative Approach to Chaos Hypothesis using Litmus Probes
Litmus Probes
Litmus probes are pluggable checks that can be defined within the ChaosEngine for any chaos experiment. The experiment pods execute these checks based on the mode they are defined in & factor their success as necessary conditions in determining the verdict of the experiment (along with the standard “in-built” checks).
Litmus currently supports three types of probes:
- httpProbe: To query health/downstream URIs
- cmdProbe: To execute any user-desired health-check function implemented as a shell command
- k8sProbe: To perform CRUD operations against native & custom Kubernetes resources
These probes can be used in isolation or in several combinations to achieve the desired checks. While the httpProbe
& k8sProbe
are fully declarative in the way they are conceived, the cmdProbe
expects the user to provide a shell command to implement checks that are highly specific to the application use case.
The probes can be set up to run in different modes:
- SoT: Executed at the Start of Test as a pre-chaos check
- EoT: Executed at the End of Test as a post-chaos check
- Edge: Executed both, before and after the chaos
- Continuous: The probe is executed continuously, with a specified polling interval during the chaos injection.
All probes share some common attributes:
- probeTimeout: Represents the time limit for the probe to execute the check specified and return the expected data.
- retry: The number of times a check is re-run upon failure in the first attempt before declaring the probe status as failed.
- interval: The period between subsequent retries
Types of Litmus Probes
httpProbe
The httpProbe
allows developers to specify a URL which the experiment uses to gauge health/service availability (or other custom conditions) as part of the entry/exit criteria. The received status code is mapped against an expected status. It can be defined at .spec.experiments[].spec.httpProbe
the path inside ChaosEngine.
httpProbe:
- name: "check-frontend-access-url"
inputs:
url: "<url>"
expectedResponseCode: "200"
mode: "Continuous"
runProperties:
probeTimeout: 5
interval: 5
retry: 1
probePollingInterval: 2
The httpProbe
is better used in the Continuous mode of operation as a parallel liveness indicator of a target or downstream application. It uses the probePollingInterval
property to specify the polling interval for the access checks.
cmdProbe
The cmdProbe
allows developers to run shell commands and match the resulting output as part of the entry/exit criteria. The intent behind this probe was to allow users to implement a non-standard & imperative way for expressing their hypothesis. For example, the cmdProbe enables you to check for specific data within a database, parse the value out of a JSON blob being dumped into a certain path or check for the existence of a particular string in the service logs.
In order to enable this behaviour, the probe supports an inline mode in which the command is run from within the experiment image as well as a source mode, where the command execution is carried out from within a new pod whose image can be specified. While inline is preferred for simple shell commands (the litmus go-runner image today is alpine-based), source mode can be used when application-specific binaries are required. The cmdProbe
can be defined at .spec.experiments[].spec.cmdProbe
the path inside the ChaosEngine.
cmdProbe:
- name: "check-database-integrity"
inputs:
command: "<command>"
expectedResult: "<expected-result>"
source: "<repo>/<tag>" # it can be “inline” or any image
mode: "Edge"
runProperties:
probeTimeout: 5
interval: 5
retry: 1
probePollingInterval: 2
k8sProbe
With the proliferation of custom resources & operators, especially in the case of stateful applications, the steady-state is manifested as status parameters/flags within Kubernetes resources. k8sProbe addresses verification of the desired resource state by allowing users to define the Kubernetes GVR (group-version-resource) with appropriate filters (field selectors/label selectors). The experiment makes use of the Kubernetes Dynamic Client to achieve this.The k8sProbe
can be defined at .spec.experiments[].spec.k8sProbe
the path inside ChaosEngine.
k8sProbe:
- name: "check-app-cluster-cr-status"
inputs:
command:
group: "<appGroup>"
version: "<appVersion>"
resource: "<appResource>"
namespace: "default"
fieldSelector: "metadata.name=<appResourceName>,status.phase=Running"
mode: "EoT"
runProperties:
probeTimeout: 5
interval: 5
retry: 1
Probe Status & Deriving Inferences
The litmus chaos experiments run the probes defined in the ChaosEngine and update their stage-wise success in the ChaosResult custom resource, with details including the overall probeSuccessPercentage
(a ratio of successful checks v/s total probes) and failure step, where applicable. The success of a probe is dependent on whether the expected status/results are met and also on whether it is successful in all the experiment phases defined by the probe’s execution mode. For example, probes that are executed in “Edge” mode, need the checks to be successful both during the pre-chaos & post-chaos phases to be declared as successful.
The pass criteria for an experiment is the logical conjunction of all probes defined in the ChaosEngine and an inbuilt entry/exit criteria. Failure of either indicates a failed hypothesis and is deemed experiment failure.
Provided below is a ChaosResult snippet containing the probe status for a mixed-probe ChaosEngine.
Name: app-pod-delete
Namespace: test
Labels: name=app-pod-delete
Annotations: <none>
API Version: litmuschaos.io/v1alpha1
Kind: ChaosResult
Metadata:
Creation Timestamp: 2020-08-29T08:28:26Z
Generation: 36
Resource Version: 50239
Self Link: /apis/litmuschaos.io/v1alpha1/namespaces/test/ChaosResults/app-pod-delete
UID: b9e3638a-b7a4-4b93-bfea-bd143d91a5e8
Spec:
Engine: probe
Experiment: pod-delete
Status:
Experimentstatus:
Fail Step: N/A
Phase: Completed
Probe Success Percentage: 100
Verdict: Pass
Probe Status:
Name: check-frontend-access-url
Status:
Continuous: Passed 👍
Type: HTTPProbe
Name: check-app-cluster-cr-status
Status:
Post Chaos: Passed 👍 #EoT
Type: K8sProbe
Name: check-database-integrity
Status:
Post Chaos: Passed 👍 #Edge
Pre Chaos: Passed 👍
Type: CmdProbe
Events:
Type Reason Age From Message
---- ------ ---- ---- -------
Normal Summary 7s pod-delete-0s2jt6-s4rdx pod-delete experiment has been Passed