2021 China Chaos Engineering Survey Report: Findings and Recommendations

The report, commissioned by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and the Chaos Engineering Lab, presents the first nationwide survey on chaos engineering in China, collecting 1,016 effective questionnaire responses and conducting 17 in‑depth enterprise interviews.

Key Findings

Software system stability in Chinese enterprises has significant room for improvement: nearly 20% of products have availability below 99% (2‑nines) and over 40% below 99.9% (3‑nines); mean time to detect (MTTD) is under 1 hour for less than half of incidents, and mean time to repair (MTTR) exceeds 1 hour for more than 60% of incidents.

Chaos engineering adoption is still in its early stage: more than 30% of companies have never used it, only 8.68% apply it at large scale, and most experiments are confined to development or testing environments rather than production.

When used, chaos engineering markedly improves availability: 65% of respondents say it boosts service availability, and 49.85% report reduced MTTR.

Primary obstacles are lack of experience (46.32%) and concerns about production‑environment risk (45.29%).

Usage Patterns

Fault injection focuses on basic resource failures (network, compute); application‑level and container‑level faults receive less attention.

Experiment targets are mainly hosts/virtual machines rather than services.

Recommendations

Introduce mature, trustworthy chaos‑engineering products or consulting services to lower adoption barriers.

Establish a measurable stability assurance system, including monitoring, resilience metrics, and fault‑grading mechanisms.

Promote a “Stability First” culture and leverage cloud‑native, AI, and big‑data technologies to enhance system resilience.

The report provides detailed charts on adoption rates, fault‑type distribution, availability metrics, and the correlation between chaos‑engineering frequency and product reliability, offering a data‑backed roadmap for enterprises seeking to strengthen system stability.