Litmus Building Blocks: ChaosEngine vs ChaosExperiment

Litmus is built around a few custom resources plus an operator that watches them. A ChaosExperiment is the reusable template: it describes one fault (pod-delete, pod-network-latency, node-drain), the litmus-go container image that runs it, the default tunables, and the RBAC permissions that fault needs. You install these from the ChaosHub, and on their own they do nothing. Think of ChaosExperiment as the recipe for what could go wrong. A ChaosEngine is the order ticket: it binds one or more ChaosExperiments to a specific target through appinfo (appns, applabel, appkind), names the chaosServiceAccount to run as, lets you override env, and attaches probes. Applying a ChaosEngine is what actually triggers a run. The chaos-operator reconciles that ChaosEngine, spins up a chaos-runner pod, and the runner launches the experiment job that injects the fault. The third resource is ChaosResult, which holds the verdict: Pass, Fail, or Awaited, plus probeSuccessPercentage and the failStep. That is your source of truth for whether the hypothesis held, not just whether the pod came back. So the short version: ChaosExperiment is the recipe, ChaosEngine is the order, ChaosResult is the review.