litmus-docs/website/versioned_docs/version-1.1.0/getstarted.md

id	title	sidebar_label	original_id
getstarted	Getting Started with Litmus	Introduction	getstarted

---

Pre-requisites

Kubernetes 1.11 or later.

Getting Started

Running chaos on your application involves the following steps:

Install Litmus

Install Chaos Experiments

Setup Service Account

Annotate your application

Prepare ChaosEngine

Run Chaos

Observe chaos results

---

Install Litmus

kubectl apply -f https://litmuschaos.github.io/pages/litmus-operator-v1.1.0.yaml

The above command install all the CRDs, required service account configuration, and chaos-operator. Before you start running a chaos experiment, verify if Litmus is installed correctly.

Verify your installation

• Verify if the chaos operator is running

kubectl get pods -n litmus

Expected output:

chaos-operator-ce-554d6c8f9f-slc8k 1/1 Running 0 6m41s

• Verify if chaos CRDs are installed

kubectl get crds | grep chaos

Expected output:

chaosengines.litmuschaos.io 2019-10-02T08:45:25Z

chaosexperiments.litmuschaos.io 2019-10-02T08:45:26Z

chaosresults.litmuschaos.io 2019-10-02T08:45:26Z

• Verify if the chaos api resources are successfully created in the desired (application) namespace.

  Note: Sometimes, it can take a few seconds for the resources to be available post the CRD installation

kubectl api-resources | grep chaos

Expected output:

chaosengines litmuschaos.io true ChaosEngine

chaosexperiments litmuschaos.io true ChaosExperiment

chaosresults litmuschaos.io true ChaosResult

NOTE:

• In this guide, we shall describe the steps to inject container-kill chaos on an nginx application already deployed in the nginx namespace. It is a mandatory requirement to ensure that the chaos custom resources (chaosexperiment and chaosengine) and the experiment specific serviceaccount are created in the same namespace (typically, the same as the namespace of the application under test (AUT), in this case nginx). This is done to ensure that the developers/users of the experiment isolate the chaos to their respective work-namespaces in shared environments.

• In all subsequent steps, please follow these instructions by replacing the nginx namespace and labels with that of your application.

Install Chaos Experiments

Chaos experiments contain the actual chaos details. These experiments are installed on your cluster as Kubernetes CRs. The Chaos Experiments are grouped as Chaos Charts and are published on Chaos Hub.

The generic chaos experiments such as pod-delete, container-kill, pod-network-latency are available under Generic Chaos Chart. This is the first chart you are recommended to install.

kubectl apply -f https://hub.litmuschaos.io/api/chaos?file=charts/generic/experiments.yaml -n nginx

Verify if the chaos experiments are installed.

kubectl get chaosexperiments -n nginx

Setup Service Account

A service account should be created to allow chaosengine to run experiments in your application namespace. Copy the following into a rbac.yaml manifest and run kubectl apply -f rbac.yaml to create one such account on the nginx namespace. This serviceaccount has just enough permissions needed to run the container-kill chaos experiment.

NOTE:

• For rbac samples corresponding to other experiments such as, say, pod-delete, please refer the respective experiment folder in the chaos-charts repository.

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: container-kill-sa
  namespace: nginx
  labels:
    name: container-kill-sa
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Role
metadata:
  name: container-kill-sa
  namespace: nginx
  labels:
    name: container-kill-sa
rules:
  - apiGroups: ["", "litmuschaos.io", "batch", "apps"]
    resources:
      [
        "pods",
        "jobs",
        "daemonsets",
        "pods/exec",
        "chaosengines",
        "chaosexperiments",
        "chaosresults",
      ]
    verbs: ["create", "list", "get", "patch", "update", "delete"]
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
  name: container-kill-sa
  namespace: nginx
  labels:
    name: container-kill-sa
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: Role
  name: container-kill-sa
subjects:
  - kind: ServiceAccount
    name: container-kill-sa
    namespace: nginx

Annotate your application

Your application has to be annotated with litmuschaos.io/chaos="true". As a security measure, and also as a means to reduce blast radius the chaos operator checks for this annotation before invoking chaos experiment(s) on the application. Replace nginx with the name of your deployment.

NOTE: Litmus supports chaos on deployments, statefulsets & daemonsets. This example refers to a nginx deploymemt. In case of other types, please use the appropriate resource/resource-name convention (say, `sts/kafka` or `ds/node-device-manager`, for example).

kubectl annotate deploy/nginx litmuschaos.io/chaos="true" -n nginx

Prepare ChaosEngine

ChaosEngine connects the application instance to a Chaos Experiment. Copy the following YAML snippet into a file called chaosengine.yaml and update the values of applabel , appns, appkind and experiments as per your choice. Change the chaosServiceAccount to the name of service account created in above previous steps.

apiVersion: litmuschaos.io/v1alpha1
kind: ChaosEngine
metadata:
  name: nginx-chaos
  namespace: nginx
spec:
  annotationCheck: "true"
  engineState: "active"
  appinfo:
    appns: "nginx"
    applabel: "app=nginx"
    appkind: "deployment"
  chaosServiceAccount: container-kill-sa
  # use retain to keep the job for debug
  jobCleanUpPolicy: "delete"
  experiments:
    - name: container-kill
      spec:
        components:
          env:
            # specify the name of the container to be killed
            - name: TARGET_CONTAINER
              value: "nginx"

Override Default Chaos Experiments Variables

From LitmusChaos v1.1.0, the default environment variable values in chaosexperiments can be overridden by specifying them in the chaosengine under experiments.<experiment_name>.spec.components.env with the desired value. In the example below, the TARGET_CONTAINER is being set to a desired value based on the application instance.

...
experiments:
    - name: container-kill
      spec:
        components:
          env:
            - name: TARGET_CONTAINER
              value: nginx

Run Chaos

kubectl apply -f chaosengine.yaml

Observe Chaos results

Describe the ChaosResult CR to know the status of each experiment. The spec.verdict is set to Awaited when the experiment is in progress, eventually changing to either Pass or Fail.

NOTE: ChaosResult CR name will be {"<chaos-engine-name>-<chaos-experiment-name>"}

kubectl describe chaosresult nginx-chaos-container-kill -n nginx

Uninstallation

You can uninstall Litmus by deleting the namespace.

kubectl delete -f https://litmuschaos.github.io/pages/litmus-operator-v1.1.0.yaml

More Chaos Experiments

• For more details on supported chaos experiments and the steps to run them, refer the Experiments section.

Join our community

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