Creating Resiliency Through Destruction - The GameDay Method

Gameday is an exercise designed to increase resilience through large-scale fault injection across critical systems where resilience is seen as the ability of a system to adapt to changes, failures, & disturbances. By “system”, he means: people, culture, processes, applications & services, infrastructure, software and hardware.

GameDay increases resilience in 3 ways:

Preparation
- Identification and mitigation of risks and impact from failure
- Reduces frequency of failure (MTBF)
- Reduces duration of recovery (MTTR)

Participation
- Builds confidence & competence responding to failure and under stress.
- Strengthens individual and cultural ability to anticipate, mitigate, respond to, and recover from failures of all types.

Exercises
- Trigger and expose “latent defects”
- Choose discover them, instead of letting that be determined by the next real disaster.

Source:  http://blogs.usenix.org/2011/12/08/gameday-creating-resiliency-through-destruction/