Blog: KubeInvaders – Gamified Chaos Engineering Tool for Kubernetes

Authors Eugenio Marzo, Sourcesense

Some months ago, I released my latest project called KubeInvaders. The
first time I shared it with the community was during an Openshift
Commons Briefing session. Kubenvaders is a Gamified Chaos Engineering
tool for Kubernetes and Openshift and helps test how resilient your
Kubernetes cluster is, in a fun way.

It is like space invaders but the aliens are PODs.

During my presentation at Codemotion Milan 2019, I started saying “of
course you can do it with few lines of bash but it is boring.”

Using the code above you can kill random PODs across a K8s cluster but I
think it is much funnier with the spaceship of Kubeinvaders.

I published the code at
https://github.com/lucky-sideburn/KubeInvaders
and there is a little community that is growing gradually. Some people
love to use it for demo sessions killing PODs on the big screens.

How to install KubeInvaders

I defined multiples modes to install it:

1. Helm Chart
   https://github.com/lucky-sideburn/KubeInvaders/tree/master/helm-charts/kubeinvaders

2. Manual Installation for Openshift using a template
   https://github.com/lucky-sideburn/KubeInvaders#install-kubeinvaders-on-openshift

3. Manual Installation for Kubernetes
   https://github.com/lucky-sideburn/KubeInvaders#install-kubeinvaders-on-kubernetes

The preferred way, of course, is with a Helm chart.

---

 # Please set target_namespace to set your target namespace!
helm install --set-string target_namespace="namespace1,namespace2" 
--name kubeinvaders --namespace kubeinvaders ./helm-charts/kubeinvaders

---

How to use KubeInvaders

Once it is installed on your cluster you can use the following
functionalities:

a. Key ‘a’ => Switch to automatic pilot;

b. Key ’m’ => Switch to manual pilot;

c. Key ‘i’ => Show pod’s name. Move the ship towards an alien;

d. Key ‘h’ => Print help;

e. Key ‘n’ => Jump between; different namespaces (my preferred feature!)

Tuning KubeInvaders

At Codemotion Milan 2019, my colleagues and I organized a desk with a
game station for playing KubeInvaders. People had to fight with K8s to
win a t-shirt.

If you have PODs that require a few seconds to start, you may lose. It
is possible to set the complexity of the game with these parameters as
env var in the K8s deployment:

a. ALIENPROXIMITY => Reduce this value to increase the distance between aliens;

b. HITSLIMIT => Seconds of CPU time to wait before shooting;

c. UPDATETIME => Seconds to wait before update PODs status (you can set also 0.x Es: 0.5);

The result is a harder game experience against the machine 😀

Use cases

Adopting chaos engineering strategies for your production environment is
really useful because it is the only way to test if a system supports
unexpected destructive events.

KubeInvaders is a game so please do not take it too seriously but it has
some important use cases:

• Test how resilient K8s clusters are on unexpected PODs deletion;

• Collect metrics like PODs restart time;

• Tuning readiness probes;

Next step

I want to continue to add some cool features and integrate it into a
Kubernetes dashboard because I am planning to transform it into a
“Gamified Chaos Engineering and Development Tool for Kubernetes”.

For “Development Tool for Kubernetes” I mean something that help
developers to interact with deployments in a K8s environment. For
example:

a. Point to the aliens to get PODs logs;

b. Deploy Helm charts shooting some particular objects;

c. Read message stored in a specific label present in a deployment;

Please feel free to contribute to
https://github.com/lucky-sideburn/KubeInvaders
and stay updated following #kubeinvaders news on Twitter
(https://twitter.com/luckysideburn)

Thanks!