An Intellyx Brain Candy Redux
We last visited Gremlin almost 2 years ago, when they were a more freshly spawned ‘chaos monkey’ from the belly of Netflix engineering. The unique goal of this company is still to ‘Break things on purpose,’ but the scope of the worst-case scenarios they can create has increased.
This new, better funded, nerdier Gremlin solution takes a more scientific approach to breaking today’s distributed and cloud-based systems, gradually building a hypothesis about application and server weaknesses that occur in the real world. Their software then starts launching seemingly random, but well-orchestrated scenarios of different attack types to test the mettle — or lack thereof — of any service under fire. Failures and results are then reported to the IT Ops, support or issue resolution tools of choice.
The company recently offered up their original two-stage attack routine in a hosted service or downloadable form called Gremlin Free, so development and ops teams can experience the thrill of having servers shut down and CPU spikes introduced before signing up for more sophisticated kinds of system abuse.
As unappealing as breaking things may sound, a dose of chaos engineering may just be the application inoculation the resiliency doctor ordered.
© 2019 Intellyx. At the time of writing, Gremlin is not an Intellyx customer. None of the other companies mentioned are Intellyx clients. Want to see more BrainCandy? Subscribe today. If you are a vendor seeking coverage from Intellyx, please contact us at PR@intellyx.com.
