Plugins

When Chaos Monkey runs inside of Netflix, it integrates with a number of proprietary systems and contains some Netflix-specific business logic. For example:

• Terminations are logged with an internal event tracking system
• Metrics are logged to an internal metrics system.
• Credentials are decrypted using an internal secrets system.
• Dynamic configuration properties are retrieved from an internal configuration system.
• Some custom rules that prevent certain termination combinations from occurring.

In order to support release Chaos Monkey as open source, these proprietary integrations are implemented as plugins that aren't released. Chaos Monkey ships with no-op implementations of these plugins.

Building Chaos Monkey with custom plugins

As an example, let's say you wished to implement a custom constrainer for your organization.

This doc assumes that you will put the code in $GOPATH/example.com/chaosmonkey. You should substitute "example.com" with something relevant to your organization.

1. Grab the open source Chaos Monkey source

If you haven't done this already, ensure the open source code is on your local machine. You can use go get for this:

go get github.com/netflix/chaosmonkey/cmd/chaosmonkey

2. Create a file with the custom constrainer implementation.

File: $GOPATH/src/example.com/chaosmonkey/constrainer.go

See the Constrainer page for an example implementation.

3. Create the file that loads the plugins

File: $GOPATH/src/example.com/chasmonkey/cmd/chaosmonkey/main.go

It looks like this:

package main


import (
    "github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey/command"

    _ "example.com/chaosmonkey/constrainer"
)

func main() {
    command.Execute()
}

4. Build the custom Chaos Monkey binary

go build example.com/chaosmonkey/cmd/chaosmonkey