Chaos Monkey is a free download available from GitHub as of today. It works by randomly terminating instances of virtual machines in , simulating what would happen during a disaster event. "The best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often," Netflix officials wrote in the blog post titled "."

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Just how secure public cloud computing offerings are from providers has come into focus this summer as Amazon Web Services that brought down Netflix, as well as other media companies Instagram and Pinterest. Salesforce.com, the major software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, in as many weeks earlier this summer as well.

Chaos Monkey can be configured to work on the Amazon Web Services offering or, with some tweaking, on other cloud computing offerings. It can be programmed to initiate a testing scheme with various frequencies and to be done during various times of the day, for example on average of once a week or once a day. In practice, a highly resilient cloud should automatically detect the outage and spin up new, identically configured virtual machines that keep the application running with no visible impact to the user.