Resilience Bites

Your chaos experiment worked perfectly. Database failed over, circuit breaker tripped, traffic rerouted, recovery completed in 30 seconds. Three months later, the same scenario in production triggered a 23-minute death spiral. The difference? You tested at 50 requests per second. Production was handling 800. Same code, same architecture, same failure injection, completely different outcomes.

Most teams make the same mistake after discovering gaps in their system understanding: they either panic and try to fix everything, or they run experiments without investigating first. Here's how to decide what to investigate, what to fix, and what actually needs an experiment.