Casey Rosenthal
Contents
Books in this wiki: Chaos Engineering
Background
Casey Rosenthal built and managed the Chaos Engineering team at Netflix for three years, simultaneously managing the Traffic Engineering team. He is one of the originators of the formal discipline of Chaos Engineering and co-author of the Principles of Chaos Engineering (principlesofchaos.org). He founded Chaos Community Day (2015) and co-authored the O'Reilly book with Nora Jones. He studied Human Factors and Safety Systems at Lund University in Sweden.
Core Positions
- Chaos Engineering is a science (Popperian falsifiability), not a techne: experiments form and test hypotheses about system behaviour.
- Complex systems are nonlinear and incomprehensible in full by any single person; failures emerge from unanticipated interactions, not individual mistakes.
- Chaos Engineering is a management tool as much as a technical one: Chaos Monkey aligns an organisation toward a shared resilience goal while remaining loosely coupled as to how teams achieve it.
- Complexity is irreducible — accidental complexity accrues perpetually; essential complexity is the price of features and safety properties.
Books
Chaos Engineering — Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice (2020)
The definitive text on the discipline, co-authored with Nora Jones and fourteen contributing authors. Covers the Netflix origin story, complexity theory foundations, the Principles of Chaos Engineering, multi-company case studies (Slack, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Capital One), a Chaos Maturity Model, and emerging frontiers including security chaos and continuous verification.