For microservices, it’s crucial to conduct resiliency testing to ensure that the system can recover from failures and keep operating as expected. Gartner reports that on average, IT downtime costs $5,600 per minute, with the cost of an hour’s downtime ranging from $140,000 to $540,000 depending on the business. A survey shows that 98% of organizations estimate the cost of a single hour of downtime to be over $100,000, while 81% say it costs over $300,000. Any disruption or downtime in these systems can lead to significant financial losses, damage to the organization’s reputation, and loss of customer trust. This is where Cavisson, a leading enabler for Fortune 100 organizations in their quest towards digital excellence, comes in. One of the key ways in which we help businesses reduce their IT downtime costs is via our chaos engineering tool, NetHavoc. This blog will explore some of the most popular design principles for ensuring resilient microservices based applications and how you can leverage NetHavoc to test their effectiveness.

What is resiliency testing?

System downtime is no longer an option. If a user is unable to access an application once, they are unlikely to use it again. Resilience is the system’s ability to gracefully handle and recover from such failures while still providing an acceptable level of service to the business. In a nutshell, it assesses the system’s resilience, introduces a flaw, and ensures that the system fully recovers. 

What are microservices?

Software architecture style that involves breaking down a large application into a set of smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and maintained separately. Each service typically has a well-defined interface and communicates with other services via lightweight protocols such as HTTP or messaging systems like RabbitMQ or Kafka. Microservices are designed to be highly modular, scalable, and resilient, and are often used in large, complex systems that require a high degree of agility and flexibility. By breaking down an application into smaller, more manageable components, microservices allow developers to make changes and updates to specific parts of the application without affecting the entire system, leading to faster development cycles, better fault tolerance, and easier maintenance.