Overview
I was first introduced to the concept of Chaos Engineering while studying for the AWS Certified Developer Associate. One of the lessons mentioned Netflix’s Chaos Monkey, which would become the very first Chaos Engineering tool to ever exist when it was initially released in 2011.
Since then, Chaos Engineering has become more necessary every year. Gremlin introduces the practice, tells us about how their tool facilitates Chaos Experimentation, and all of the benefits that can be derived from it.
Certification Preparation Materials
Every single thing that we need to pass the exam is provided in their web-based course.
Timeline
The platform they used was amazing. Easily the best learning experience I’ve come across yet. It tracked how long I spent in the course, which makes recounting my timeline extremely easy.
It’s not entirely accurate to say that this took me over a week. I started it on a whim, but then work picked up and I didn’t have as much time to dedicate towards completing this certification. The three and a half hours is more accurate. This is one that could be even completed in less than two hours.
The Exam
There was no need to schedule the exam or use a proctor. It was an open-note exam. I took meticulous notes while I was studying, but that’s not necessary. However, I have found that note-taking really helps with learning concepts and committing things to memory. I would not recommend cramming for this one. Stretch it out over a weekend and dive into their documentation and tutorials.
What Next?
If you have not yet completed any cloud certifications, those are the next most logical destination. Chaos Engineering is all about finding hidden risks in complex, decoupled systems that are usually hosted in the cloud.
Besides diving into cloud computing, this certification repeatedly touches on something over and over again: observability. It would make a lot of sense to start learning more about that next. Check out certifications offered by DataDog, Splunk, New Relic, etc.