Create Chaos Mesh Workflow

To meet this need, Chaos Mesh provided Chaos Mesh Workflow, a built-in workflow engine. Using this engine, you can run different Chaos experiments in serial or parallel to simulate production-level errors.

Currently, Chaos Mesh Workflow supports the following features:

  • Parallel Orchestration
  • Customized tasks
  • Conditional branch

Typical user scenarios:

  • Use parallel orchestration to inject multiple NetworkChaos faults to simulate complex web environments.
  • Use serial orchestration to perform health checks and use the conditional branch to determine whether to perform the remaining steps.

The design of Chaos Mesh Workflow is, to some extent, inspired by Argo Workflows. If you are familiar with Argo Workflows, you can also quickly get started with Chaos Mesh Workflow.

More workflow examples are available in the .

Click NEW WORKFLOW.

Step 2. Setup basic information of the workflow

Workflow Info

Step 3. Configure the nodes of the workflow

  1. Select an option under Choose task type according to your needs.

    note

    Chaos Dashboard automatically creates a serial node named “entry” as the entry point for this workflow.

  2. Fill out the experiment information.

    The configuration method is the same as creating a normal chaos experiment. For example, you can set up a “POD KILL” type of “PodChaos” named kill-nginx.

    Create podkill in Workflow

You can check workflow definition through Preview, and then click the SUBMIT WORKFLOW to create the workflow.

Similar to various types of Chaos objects, workflows also exist in a Kubernetes cluster as a CRD. You can create a Chaos Mesh workflow using kubectl create -f <workflow.yaml>. The following command is an example of creating a workflow. Create a workflow using a local YAML file:

Create a workflow using a YAML file from the network:

In the above YAML template, the templates fields define the steps of the experiment. The entry field defines the entry of the workflow when the workflow is being executed.

Each element in templates represents a workflow step. For example:

templateType: Parallel means that the node type is parallel. deadline: 240s means that all parallel experiments on this node are expected to be performed in 240 seconds; otherwise, the experiments time out. children means the other template names to be executed in parallel.

For example:

templateType: PodChaos means that the node type is PodChaos experiments. means that the current Chaos experiment lasts for 40 seconds. podChaos is the definition of the PodChaos experiment.

It is flexible to create a workflow using a YAML file and kubectl. You can nest parallel or serial orchestrations to declare complex orchestrations, and even combine the orchestration with conditional branches to achieve a circular effect.

Workflow field description

Template field description

note

When creating a Chaos with a duration in the workflow, you need to fill the duration in the outer deadline field instead of using the duration field in Chaos.

Conditional branch field description

Currently, two context variables are provided in expression:

  • stdout indicates the standard output for a customized task.

Container field description

The following table only lists the commonly used fields. For the definitions of more fields, see Kubernetes documentation - core1.Container.