Steady State
Architecture & DesignSteady state is the measurable, normal operating behavior of a system, expressed as output metrics rather than internal details. It is the anchor of every chaos experiment: you confirm the steady state before a fault, then watch whether it holds during the fault.
Good Steady-State Signals
- p95 and p99 response latency (more revealing than averages)
- Error rate or success rate of a key transaction
- Throughput, such as orders processed per minute
Choosing the right signal matters: a gray failure can keep error rate at zero while latency quietly climbs, so a steady state defined only on error rate would miss it. This is why observability comes before chaos.
Related Terms
The practice of deliberately injecting failures into a system to discover weaknesses before they cause outages, by forming a hypothesis about steady state and testing it under real-world fault conditions.
The managed AWS service for running controlled chaos engineering experiments, injecting faults such as stopping instances, adding latency, failing over databases, or isolating an Availability Zone, with built-in stop conditions.
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