Architecture Summary
The Litmus architecture can be segregated into two parts:
Control Plane: Contains the components required for the functioning of Chaos Center, the website-based portal for Litmus.
Execution Plane: Contains the components required for the injection of chaos in the target resources.
Chaos Center can be used for creating, scheduling, and monitoring Chaos Workflows, a set of chaos experiments defined in a definitive sequence to achieve desired chaos impact on the target resources upon execution. Users can log in to the Chaos Center using valid login credentials and leverage the interactive web UI to define their chaos workflow to target multiple aspects of their infrastructure. Once the user creates a Chaos Workflow using the Chaos Center, it is passed on to the Execution Plane. The Execution Plane can be present either in the host cluster containing the Control Plane if the self agent is being used, or in the target cluster if an external agent is being used. The Execution Plane interprets the Chaos Workflow as a list of steps required for injecting chaos into the target resources. It ensures efficient orchestration of chaos in cloud-native environments using various Kubernetes CRs. Once the Chaos Workflow is executed, Execution Plane sends the chaos result to the Control Plane for their post-processing using either the built-in monitoring dashboard of Litmus or using external observability tools such as Prometheus DB and Grafana dashboard. Litmus also achieves automated Chaos Workflow runs to execute chaos as part of the CI/CD pipeline based on a set of defined conditions using GitOps.