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Containerising Chaos Toolkit

You may find yourself in a situation that requires you to run your Chaos Toolkit Experiments from within a container. This may be to encapsulate the dependencies required or to run CTK in a different environment, for whichever reason you have, containerising CTK is straightforward.

Chaos Toolkit provides three images you can use as bases for your own needs:

  • chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit which is tagged latest and per new releases version. It’s based on Python 3.11 Alpine base image. So it’s not suitable for every configuration when you need specific software in your image
  • chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:basic is based on Python 3.11 Debian Bullseye base image. It only contains Chaos Toolkit as per the previous image but is based on Debian with a more recent Python version
  • chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:full is based on Python 3.11 Debian Bullseye base image. It contains Chaos Toolkit and a list of extensions and is based on Debian with a more recent Python version

Using the vanilla chaostoolkit image

Chaos Toolkit builds and pushes a Docker Image upon every release of a new version of the chaostoolkit package. This can then be used out of the box by referring to it locally on the command line with:

docker run chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:latest info core

Unable to find image 'chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit
Digest: sha256:3801eda37de7e8f00fb556220fff7935fea45d248881f4253cd9c29b4d3023f3
Status: Downloaded newer image for chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:latest
NAME                VERSION   
CLI                 1.9.2     
Core library        1.19.0

It should be noted that this only contains vanilla chaostoolkit.

You could then mount a directory containing your experiments (if they are only using vanilla chaostoolkit) and run them:

docker run \
-v $PWD/experiments:/experiments \
chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:latest \
--log-file /experiments/chaostoolkit.log \
run /experiments/experiment.json \
--journal-path /experiments/journal.json

You’d then find in $PWD/experiments:

ls $PWD/experiments

chaostoolkit.log experiment.json  journal.json

Containerising with extensions

You can obviously use the chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:full image which contains the most commonly used extensions. But you can also tailor to your need as follows. We will be using the chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:basic image as base so we build using a Debian image.

chaostoolkit-aws example

If for example, you needed certain AWS activities for your chaos experiments, you could create a Dockerfile like so:

FROM chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:basic

RUN pip install chaostoolkit-aws

To then use this, you’d first build the image:

docker build -t ctk-aws .

[+] Building 2.1s (6/6) FINISHED                                                                                                                                                            
 => [internal] load build definition from Dockerfile                                                                                0.0s
 => => transferring dockerfile: 114B                                                                                                0.0s
 => [internal] load .dockerignore                                                                                                   0.0s
 => => transferring context: 2B                                                                                                     0.0s
 => [internal] load metadata for docker.io/chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:latest                                                         2.0s
 => [1/2] FROM docker.io/chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:latest@sha256:3801eda37de7e8f00fb556220fff7935fea45d248881f4253cd9c29b4d3023f3   0.0s
 => => resolve docker.io/chaostoolkit/chaostoolkit:latest@sha256:3801eda37de7e8f00fb556220fff7935fea45d248881f4253cd9c29b4d3023f3   0.0s
 => CACHED [2/2] RUN pip install chaostoolkit-aws                                                                                   0.0s
 => exporting to image                                                                                                              0.0s
 => => exporting layers                                                                                                             0.0s
 => => writing image sha256:84f4579bee5ff42881a226643dbe37c8bc1e0ecb60e153c46395f9dc62a8f256                                        0.0s
 => => naming to docker.io/library/ctk-aws                                                                                          0.0s

Then you’d confirm chaostoolkit-aws is available with:

docker run ctk-aws info extensions

NAME                                    VERSION   LICENSE                       DESCRIPTION
chaostoolkit-aws                        0.16.0    Apache License Version 2.0    AWS