Overview of Steadybit 101
Introduction to Steadybit Academy
Welcome to the Steadybit Academy, your go-to resource for learning how to make your systems more reliable. This guide provides a high-level overview of Steadybit, the platform designed to help you find and fix reliability risks before they become incidents. Whether you’re an SRE, engineer, or architect, this 101 course will walk you through all of the basics of using Steadybit to strengthen your systems’ reliability.
The Challenge of Modern Software Systems
Operating in the modern software ecosystem has never been more complex. With the rise of microservices, distributed cloud computing, infrastructure as code, 3rd-party dependencies, and new AI implementations; it’s seriously challenging to predict how your systems will behave in any given scenario.
All of these pieces of your system are constantly evolving with every new release. Your customers expect services they can rely on, so you can’t simply throw your hands up and resign to the chaos. You need to start testing your systems for the unexpected.
Reactive vs. Proactive Reliability Practices
With every new incident and alert, engineers are pulled into a cycle of detection, mitigation, and diagnosis. This incident response process can become a tireless loop. Time that could be spent on systematic improvements is exhausted by reactive firefighting.
If your team can make the switch to a more proactive reliability approach, you can use controlled experiments to improve system resilience, foster a culture of reliability, and deliver less downtime and a better customer experience.
What is Steadybit?
Steadybit is the reliability assessment platform that helps you turn complexity into clarity and surfacing risks before they turn into disruption. By combining automatic issue detection with a best-in-class experiment editor, Steadybit provides teams with the tools they need to reveal risks, validate fixes, and build confidence in their systems.
From automated reliability testing to hypothesis-based chaos engineering, Steadybit makes it easy for platform engineering and SRE teams to continually deliver high availability applications with confidence.
Why Steadybit?
Steadybit was designed to lower the barrier to getting started with chaos engineering. With recommendations and an easy-to-use editor, anyone can build a new experiment quickly, run it safely, and review the results. Our open source extension framework also makes it easy and fast to integrate Steadybit into your tech stack in a customizable way.
Unlike open source or other commercial tools, Steadybit is designed to solve the key challenges to rolling out chaos engineering across an organization, like deployment flexibility, safety controls & guardrails, and overall ease-of-use.
Continually Improving Reliability with Steadybit
As teams work to strengthen their system resilience, they will leverage these key features in Steadybit to continuously improve their reliability posture:
- Explorer: Visualize and interact with your services to identify missing redundancies
- Reliability Advice: Review data-driven recommendations based on configuration best practices.
- Experiment Editor & Templates: Design and run experiments to test your system behavior during a variety of attacks and checks.
- Reporting: Zoom out to see clear trends based on the experiments you are running with Steadybit.
This continuous improvement loop helps teams build confidence and make reliability an ongoing habit, not a one-time project.
Fostering a Culture of Reliability
One of the reasons why Steadybit works to lower the barrier to entry for chaos engineering is that system reliability is a team sport. From developers, to SREs, to architects, platform engineers, product managers, and on; everyone has to be invested in the value of reliable systems.
Experiments are an opportunity to proactive prove the value of stress testing your systems and finding risks earlier in the software development lifecycle.
With controlled targets and a limited blast radius, Steadybit enables safe learning that can bring multiple teams and stakeholders into the same room.
Without this type of work being done in the open, teams are just quietly hoping nothing bad happens – and hope is not a strategy.
Your Chaos Engineering Journey with Steadybit
Now that we’ve shared this high-level explanation of Steadybit and the role it plays, let’s briefly outline the rest of this 101 course.
The next few lessons in the Academy will arm you with important definitions and information about the Steadybit architecture. After that, you’ll hear about some key features in the platform and learn how to build and run experiments. Lastly, we’ll explain some of the ways you can bring automation into the mix to run powerful reliability workflows.
We designed this course to quickly convey all the information you will need to get started using Steadybit. Soon, we’ll be adding additional modules (201, 301, etc.) to share more advanced concepts and approaches.
Thank you for starting on this learning journey. Continue on to the next lesson to take your next step towards building truly reliable systems.
