The chaos engineering company Gremlin wants to help provide more insight into how much harm downtime can cost with the announcement today of Scenarios at the company’s Chaos Conf. This new capability has the ability to simulate real-world outages that can lead to costly downtime.
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“Since we released Gremlin Free back in February, thousands of customers have signed up to get started with Chaos Engineering. But many organizations are still struggling to decide which experiments to run, in order to avoid major downtime and outages,” said Kolton Andrus, CEO and co-founder of Gremlin. “That’s exactly why we’ve added templates of real-world outages into our application. Now Gremlin users can easily simulate major failures with a couple of clicks, and validate their systems’ ability to withstand them.”
The company is focused on breaking systems on purpose with the goal of exposing weaknesses.
Some scenarios Gremlin addresses are:
- Traffic spikes, to fine-tune thresholds and test failover architectures
- Unreliable networks, to provide insight into how users might be impacted when support API calls take 100s or 1000s of milliseconds
- Region evacuation, to ensure services are available in more than one region
- DNS outage, to understand what happens when your provider or secondary solution are unavailable
- Unavailable dependency, for ensuring great user experiences with every function
- Prepare for host failure, for being prepared when hosts inevitably fail
“In a world where nearly every business is an online business, Gremlin makes companies more resilient and saves millions of dollars in unnecessary disasters and outages,” said Tomasz Tunguz, managing director at Redpoint Ventures, a venture capital firm who has invested in the company.
