Chaos Engineering for LLM Production

Chaos engineering for LLMs is its own discipline in 2026. Prerequisites before running experiments in production: defined SLI/SLO, trace+metric+log observability, automated rollback, runbooks, on-call. Architecture has four planes: control (experiment scheduler), target (services, infra, data stores), safety (guards + abort + traffic filters), observability (metrics + traces + logs), feedback (into SLO adjustments). Guardrails are mandatory: burn-rate alerts pause experiments if daily error-budget burn > 2x expected; suppression windows + trace-ID correlation dedupe alert noise. Cadence: weekly small canary + SLO review; monthly game day + postmortem; quarterly cross-team resilience audit + dependency mapping. LLM-specific experiments: memory overload, network failures, provider outages, malformed prompts, KV cache eviction storms. Tooling: Harness Chaos Engineering (LLM-derived recommendations, blast-radius downscaling, MCP tool integration); LitmusChaos (CNCF); Chaos Mesh (CNCF Kubernetes-native).

Learn 1 hr Python (stdlib, toy chaos experiment runner)

Prerequisites: Phase 17 · 23 (SRE for AI), Phase 17 · 13 (Observability)

#Learning Objectives

  • Name the five chaos engineering prerequisites (SLI/SLO, observability, rollback, runbooks, on-call) and explain why skipping any breaks the practice.
  • Diagram the four planes (control, target, safety, observability) and the feedback loop into SLO.
  • Enumerate five LLM-specific experiments (memory overload, network fail, provider outage, malformed prompt, KV eviction storm).
  • Pick a tool — Harness, LitmusChaos, Chaos Mesh — given stack.
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The text and code of this lesson are based on AI Engineering from Scratch by Rohit Ghumare, MIT licensed.