Authors Eugenio Marzo, Sourcesense
Some months ago, I released my latest project called KubeInvaders. The
first time I shared it with the community was during an Openshift
Commons Briefing session. Kubenvaders is a Gamified Chaos Engineering
tool for Kubernetes and Openshift and helps test how resilient your
Kubernetes cluster is, in a fun way.
It is like space invaders but the aliens are PODs.
During my presentation at Codemotion Milan 2019, I started saying “of
course you can do it with few lines of bash but it is boring.”
Using the code above you can kill random PODs across a K8s cluster but I
think it is much funnier with the spaceship of Kubeinvaders.
I published the code at
and there is a little community that is growing gradually. Some people
love to use it for demo sessions killing PODs on the big screens.
How to install KubeInvaders
I defined multiples modes to install it:
Helm Chart
Manual Installation for Openshift using a template
Manual Installation for Kubernetes
The preferred way, of course, is with a Helm chart.
Please set target_namespace to set your target namespace!
helm install --set-string target_namespace=“namespace1,namespace2” \
–name kubeinvaders --namespace kubeinvaders ./helm-charts/kubeinvaders
How to use KubeInvaders
Once it is installed on your cluster you can use the following
functionalities:
a. Key ‘a’ => Switch to automatic pilot;
b. Key ’m’ => Switch to manual pilot;
c. Key ‘i’ => Show pod\’s name. Move the ship towards an alien;
d. Key ‘h’ => Print help;
e. Key ‘n’ => Jump between; different namespaces (my preferred feature!)
Tuning KubeInvaders
At Codemotion Milan 2019, my colleagues and I organized a desk with a
game station for playing KubeInvaders. People had to fight with K8s to
win a t-shirt.
If you have PODs that require a few seconds to start, you may lose. It
is possible to set the complexity of the game with these parameters as
env var in the K8s deployment:
a. ALIENPROXIMITY => Reduce this value to increase the distance between aliens;
b. HITSLIMIT => Seconds of CPU time to wait before shooting;
c. UPDATETIME => Seconds to wait before update PODs status (you can set also 0.x Es: 0.5);
The result is a harder game experience against the machine 
Use cases
Adopting chaos engineering strategies for your production environment is
really useful because it is the only way to test if a system supports
unexpected destructive events.
KubeInvaders is a game so please do not take it too seriously but it has
some important use cases:
Test how resilient K8s clusters are on unexpected PODs deletion;
Collect metrics like PODs restart time;
Tuning readiness probes;
Next step
I want to continue to add some cool features and integrate it into a
Kubernetes dashboard because I am planning to transform it into a
“Gamified Chaos Engineering and Development Tool for Kubernetes”.
For “Development Tool for Kubernetes” I mean something that help
developers to interact with deployments in a K8s environment. For
example:
a. Point to the aliens to get PODs logs;
b. Deploy Helm charts shooting some particular objects;
c. Read message stored in a specific label present in a deployment;
Please feel free to contribute to
and stay updated following #kubeinvaders news on Twitter
(https://twitter.com/luckysideburn )
Thanks!
Original Source: KubeInvaders - Gamified Chaos Engineering Tool for Kubernetes - Kubernetes