Chaos engineering: introducing failure in production without losing your job

Chaos engineering sounds cool on paper, but getting approval to intentionally break things in production, even controlled, can feel like you're losing your mind. We've managed to integrate it effectively, but it was a gradual process. We started small with internal 'game days' in our staging environments. We'd simulate network partitions or latency spikes and see how our applications reacted. This built a lot of confidence within the engineering teams. Then we moved to very targeted, low-impact experiments in production, like gently increasing latency to a non-critical internal service or randomly killing a single pod in a non-customer-facing deployment. The blast radius was always tiny, and we had strong rollback plans. The key was demonstrating the value: identifying obscure failure modes, validating our monitoring and alerting, and improving our fault tolerance before a real incident. Over time, as trust grew, we could do more impactful experiments, always with clear hypotheses, observability, and automatic abort conditions. It's about building confidence incrementally, showing rather than just telling that injecting failure makes us more resilient.