LitmusChaos Q1-Q2 2026 update: community, contributions, and project progress

About LitmusChaos

LitmusChaos is an open source chaos engineering platform that helps teams identify weaknesses and potential outages in their infrastructure by running controlled chaos experiments. Built on cloud native principles, LitmusChaos enables teams to validate system resilience and proactively strengthen their DevOps pipelines against real-world software and infrastructure failures.

Started in late 2017 with a focus on simple chaos jobs for Kubernetes, LitmusChaos became a CNCF Sandbox project in 2020 and was promoted to a CNCF Incubating project in January 2022. Today, the project is maintained by contributors from multiple organizations across cloud-native vendors, solution providers, and end users.

The first half of 2026 was one of the busiest stretches the project has had. Six releases shipped, the community kept growing across every channel we track, and we closed the half with a keynote slot at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India. Here is what happened between January and June.

Community Growth, January to Now

Metric

Growth / Change

Details & Context

LinkedIn Following

+39% (769 to 1,069)

Driven by energy put into in-person events, KubeCon India, and three Resilience Testing meetups rather than online content alone.

Contributor Base

+16% (241 to 279)

Spread across six releases rather than concentrated in a single big push.

GitHub Stars

+7.4% (5,118 to 5,496)

A steady climb rather than a spike, which is usually the better signal for a project at this stage.

Project Updates & Releases

Across these six releases, LitmusChaos welcomed 26 new contributors, and the release cadence stayed consistent with a shipped version every month.

Release 3.30.0 (June 2026)

Mostly infrastructure hardening this month: a new metrics port, a GraphQL config fix, and tighter RBAC on project membership queries. Security patches to Docker base images and Go dependencies rounded it out.

For more details, check out the release.

Key Highlights: Added a metrics port to litmusportal-server manifests

Updated the GraphQL endpoint configuration to use ChaosGraphQLEndpoint

Added a nil guard for experimentID in CreateChaosExperiment

Security hardening across Docker base images and Go dependencies

Restricted GetActiveProjectMembers to project owners as an RBAC fix

New Contributors: @Ram04102007, @wingwogus

Release 3.29.0 (May 2026)

A security patch and a new observability feature landed in the same release. CVE-2026-33186 got patched with a gRPC version bump, and Prometheus metrics support shipped with a getting-started guide.

For more details, check out the release.

Key Highlights: Patched CVE-2026-33186 by bumping google.golang.org/grpc to v1.79.3

Fixed a bug that allowed duplicate chaos experiment triggers under concurrent reconciles

Added support for stopping experiments when infra is disconnected

Shipped Prometheus metrics support, along with a getting-started guide and unit tests

Fixed a blank page bug in the CronWorkflow run history

Fixed useRouteWithBaseUrl not refreshing on projectID or scope changes

New Contributors: @PietroPasotti, @nXtCyberNet, @Coen90, @suhr25, @xorjnox, @dongjune8931

Release 3.28.0 (April 2026)

This release fixed a stale config leak across probes and a subscriber crash on Workflow ADD events, plus a base image upgrade that closed a Python vulnerability. It also marked a new public adopter.

For more details, check out the release.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, officially joined as a LitmusChaos adopter this release. Thanks to Pietro Pasotti for making that connection happen.

Key Highlights: Added Canonical as an adopter

Fixed a stale config leak across multiple probes of the same type

Fixed a subscriber crash on Workflow ADD events with ChaosEngine nodes

Added the VMware logo to the platform

Upgraded the frontend base image to ubi9 to resolve a Python vulnerability

Fixed an image registry bug affecting edit and clone experiments

New Contributors: @pcandido

Release 3.27.0 (March 2026)

Job targeting landed as a new capability, alongside a run of crash fixes across the subscriber and GitOps sync paths. UI fixes rounded out the release, from blank project pages to a backend URL-trailing-slash bug.

For more details, check out the release.

Key Highlights: Added support for targeting Jobs in chaos experiments

Return a 503 when the database is down, so probe detection stays accurate

Fixed a subscriber crash caused by a nil pointer dereference on Workflow ADD events

Removed the 1024-character limit on CMD probe commands

Fixed crashes and added an error console for invalid YAML syntax

Fixed a two-way GitOps sync issue by enabling the sync handler goroutine

Fixed a deadlock in GitMutexLock.Unlock

UI fixes: preserved Chaos Checker container resources in TuneExperiment, fixed blank pages from empty projectIDs, fixed a backend URL trailing slash issue

New Contributors: @mihir-dixit2k27, @WHOIM1205, @sagar-h007, @biswarup1290dass, @aditya-systems-hub, @mugiwaraluffy56, @r6mez

Release 3.26.0 (February 2026)

A maintenance-focused release: CI fixes, updated contributor documentation, and cleanup across the frontend build. No major features, just keeping the pipeline healthy.

For more details, check out the release.

Key Highlights: Updated sidebar layout and resolved a Spring Boot build failure

Updated CONTRIBUTING.md with new community meeting details

Added unit tests for subscriber k8s operations

Fixed MongoDB readiness checks in start-dev.sh

Fixed a TypeScript error from duplicate YAMLBuilder module typings

Added a validation schema for image registry input

New Contributors: @Maximus-08, @Abdelrhmansersawy, @Debjyoti2004, @Skyiesac

Release 3.25.0 (January 2026)

Kicked off the year with reliability fixes for the ChaosCenter portal, including a persistent blank-screen bug on refresh. A new CI linter and a GitHub Action for release artifacts also shipped.

For more details, check out the release.

Key Highlights: Fixed a blank screen on refresh by persisting the projectID

Added a Docker linter to CI

Fixed the name uniqueness check to ignore removed experiments

Added a GitHub Action workflow for ChaosCenter release artifact generation

Resolved DOM nesting warnings in the dashboard table

New Contributors: @khtee, @oglok, @shovan-mondal, @xnaveenx, @intojhanurag, @akhilmukkara

Case Studies & Event Highlights

Flipkart Wins the CNCF End User Case Study Contest

The biggest project milestone of the half came at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026 in Mumbai, June 18-19.

Flipkart was named the winner of the CNCF End User Case Study Contest India, for a story built on LitmusChaos. The win earned Flipkart and LitmusChaos a keynote slot on the main stage.

The talk, “From Afterthought to Practice: How Flipkart Built a Multi-tenant Chaos Platform on LitmusChaos,” was delivered by Aditya Sridasyam, Software Development Engineer at Flipkart, alongside Uma Mukkara, Head of Resilience Testing.

Flipkart runs hundreds of tightly coupled microservices that need to hold up under the traffic Big Billion Days and festive sales generate. Resilience used to be something the team dealt with after an outage. To change that, Flipkart’s Central Reliability Engineering team built a centralized chaos platform on top of LitmusChaos and engineered four customizations to run it at their scale:

A hybrid multi-tenancy architecture that sits between cluster-wide and namespace-wide installs

A DaemonSet-based high-availability model for chaos injection

A Script Runner fault that enables dynamic target selection and context chaining

A hybrid VM chaos extension for workloads that are not running on Kubernetes

Flipkart also contributed five fixes back upstream to LitmusChaos, including database index fixes for project-scoped probe uniqueness and duplicate-name validation repairs during tag edits. Uma Mukkara covered how contributions like these flow back and benefit the broader community.

Read the full Flipkart case study on CNCF for the reference architecture and impact numbers.

Project Pavilion at KubeCon India

Our booth at the pavilion saw between 100 and 200 visitors across the two days. What came up most:

Resilience testing and reliability in the age of AI: AI inference workloads fail differently from traditional services, and a lot of booth conversations were about where chaos engineering fits into that.

ChaosHub is the default fault library: For most visitors, it was their first look at how much is available out of the box across Kubernetes, Linux, AWS, GCP, and more.

Automating chaos in CI/CD: The common ask was how to shift the chaos left. We walked people through integrating LitmusChaos into pipelines using LitmusCTL, SDKs, and Terraform without requiring an overhaul of the delivery process.

Tool comparisons: Several side-by-side conversations on where LitmusChaos fits relative to other chaos engineering tools, and why the CNCF-backed, community-driven model matters for long-term adoption.

Custom chaos and maturity: For teams whose infrastructure patterns fall outside the default library, we talked through building custom experiments and what a mature chaos practice looks like at different stages.

LitmusChaos MCP: We introduced the Model Context Protocol integration, which lets engineers interact with and learn about chaos engineering through natural language.

New adopters: We shared that Canonical had recently joined as an official adopter, and Flipkart’s keynote the same day gave that conversation extra weight.

Community Events & Adoption

In-Person Meetup Events

This half, we hosted three Resilience Testing meetups in Bangalore.

Resilience Testing Meetup on February 21

Hosted in collaboration with Cloud Computing Circle, 90+ engineers for an afternoon covering chaos engineering at scale and AI agents, with an all-women speaker lineup. Details here.

Resilience Testing Meetup on April 18

Hosted with Cloud Computing Circle with an amazing speaker lineup. Details here.

Resilience Testing Meetup on May 9

Hosted with the Platform and Resilience Engineering community, with 110+ people showing up at the Harness office. Details here.

User Stories: Canonical

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, joined LitmusChaos as an adopter this half. The team is building a suite of Juju charmed operators that deploy and manage the entire LitmusChaos control plane on Kubernetes, aiming to make chaos engineering a first-class part of the Juju ecosystem alongside the databases and observability stacks teams already manage declaratively. Litmus’s CRD-based approach and CNCF-backed fault catalog made it a natural fit, and Canonical is using it to prove that its charmed operators handle Day-2 disruptions gracefully, from leader failover to automatic recovery after infrastructure failures. Check out more details here.

Community Meetings & Content

Monthly Community Meetings: Held every third Wednesday of the month at 10 PM IST / 6:30 PM CET / 5:30 PM BST / 11:30 AM CT / 9:30 AM PST. Recordings are on our YouTube channel, and meeting notes are here.

Monthly Contributors Meetings: Held every second and last Thursday at 7:00 PM IST / 1:30 PM GMT / 3:30 PM CEST / 9:30 AM ET. Find videos on YouTube and meeting notes here.

On the Road: LitmusChaos also traveled beyond Bangalore this half, with talks on the LitmusChaos MCP Server and chaos engineering at DevConf India, FOSSASIA in Bangkok, and Open Source Days in Ahmedabad, as well as the KubeCon India keynote.

Closing Thoughts

Six releases, one new public adopter, three packed meetups, and a keynote at KubeCon India. That is what the first half of 2026 looked like for LitmusChaos. The Flipkart story in particular is a good reminder of why this project exists: teams running chaos engineering at real scale, hitting real production constraints, and contributing what they learn back upstream.

The second half of the year is already shaping up around the same theme: more production adopters, more upstream contributions, and more in-person rooms full of people debugging resilience together.

Keep Learning. Keep Testing. Keep Building Resilience.

Connect with LitmusChaos

Visit the LitmusChaos Website for more detailed information about LitmusChaos and getting involved with the community.

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