Looking back on a day of chaos

Wow. Last month was a whirlwind. We hosted our first conference, launched a brand new product, and raised some funding to increase product velocity and continue to educate and grow the chaos engineering community.

Won't Get Fooled Again

It was relatively quiet, late one Friday afternoon, with many of the Gremlin employees gearing up for a long weekend filled with festivities, when all of a sudden alarms started blaring. Our service had decided to start serving 5xx errors, more or less indiscriminately, just as everyone was getting ready to call it quits. I'm sure you can imagine our surprise, considering nobody was monkeying with the database, pushing code to production or doing anything of real consequence. Nevertheless, our service was on fire, and in desperate need of a little TLC, so we spun up a call and hopped on the offending instances.

How Remind uses Gremlin to improve user experience at peak traffic

Remind is a communication platform that allows schools and districts to reach and engage with their communities. With a presence in over 70% of US public schools, Remind experiences a pattern of cyclical usage: The number of active users skyrockets every year in August and September, when teachers and students return to school. In 2017, during the company's biggest back-to-school season to date, Remind passed 27 million active users and spent two weeks at the top of Apple's App Store.

Treating Containers As First-Class Citizens

When we launched Gremlin late last year, we knew the journey ahead would be two-fold. First and foremost, we would need to educate companies, ultimately changing the way they think about operations and shifting the culture to be much more proactive. And then we’d need to build a product which enabled them to do just that. We knew that in traditional organizations, too much engineering time was spent fighting fires and addressing problems after they’ve already impacted customers.

Mikolaj Pawlikowski: "Introducing Chaos in Bloomberg" - Chaos Conf 2018

I work for Bloomberg but I work in London. I had the pleasure of the magic airplane when I spent 11 hours on the plane and I landed three hours later. Be easy on me.

Adrian Cockroft: "Chaos Engineering - What it is, and where it's going" - Chaos Conf 2018

This is the keynote from Chaos Conf 2018, given by Adrian Cockroft, VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS.

Vilas Veeraraghaven: "Practicing Chaos Engineering at Walmart" - Chaos Conf 2018

The title of my talk is Practicing Chaos Engineering. That goes against the grain of work we really do because the goal really is resiliency. I'm gonna change that title and I'll explain why. The title is gonna change from Practicing Chaos Engineering to Practicing Resilience Engineering. The key thing to understand here is we are not trying to practice inserting chaos in a system. We are trying to practice how resilient we can be when there is chaos in a system. Taking this, we'll make sure that we carry this meeting through the rest of the slides.

Kriss Rochefolle: "How to Convince Your Boss to Say "Yes!" to Chaos Engineering" - Chaos Conf 2018

Let's break things in production it's gonna be fun! It's really not the best way to convince your boss. Maybe Earth, like my feet. Sorry. So, let's pick a better way to convince your boss. This made up, in France, we call this the big clogs, and I think here you would call it 'A Bull in a China Shop'. It's really, really not a good way to do it. So, a bit about me, even if everything, I will just write a book about their reps and I'm an agent of chaos.

Ronnie Chen: "Staying Alive: Patterns for Failure Management from the Depths" - Chaos Conf 2018

Hi everyone. So, this talk is about failures. What they look like, how to prepare for them, and how to survive them. My name is Ronnie Chen, and I'm an engineering manager at Twitter. I'm also a technical diver.

Why You Need Chaos Engineering in Your Hybrid Infrastructure

Originally published on DevOps.com.

Announcing Our Newest Gremlin

Gremlin’s Chaos Engineering platform currently offers a library of 12 infrastructure and application level attacks to recreate just about any failure scenario you might encounter in production. That being said, one of the most common questions we get when speaking to our users is, What other attack types are you working on?

Yury Niño Roa: Lightning Talk: Hot Recipes for Building Chaos Experiments - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Aval Digital Labs DevOps Engineer and Chaos Engineering Advocate, Yury Niño Roa’s, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Robert Ross & Tammy Butow: Incident Repro & Playbook Validation with Chaos Engineering - Chaos Conf

The following is a transcript from FireHydrant CEO, Robert Ross and Gremlin Principal SRE, Tammy Butow’s, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Paul Osman and Ana Medina: Embracing Chaos - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Under Armour's Senior Manager of SRE, Paul Osman's and Gremlin’s Chaos Engineer, Ana Medina's, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Subbu Allamaraju: Forming Failure Hypotheses - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Expedia Vice President, Subbu Allamaraju’s, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Jose Esquivel: A Roadmap Towards Chaos Engineering - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Backcountry Engineer Manager, Jose Esquivel’s, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Niran Fajemisin: Lightning Talk: Transitive Logic of Systems Fallibility - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Starbucks Director of Engineering, Niran Fajemisin’s, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Lenny Sharpe and Brian Lee: Finding the Joy in Chaos Engineering - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Target Director of IT Resiliency Engineering, Lenny Sharpe's and Target Assistant Manager, Brian Lee's, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Joyce Lin: Lightning Talk: Who Is Responsible for Chaos? - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Postman Lead Developer Advocate, Joyce Lin’s, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Crystal Hirschorn: The Future of Chaos Engineering: In Pursuit of Unknown Unknowns - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Condé Nast VP of Engineering, Crystal Hirschorn’s, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Caroline Dickey: Think Big: Chaos Testing a Monolith - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Mailchimp Site Reliability Engineer, Caroline Dickey’s, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Jason Yee: Lightning Talk: What Should I Monitor? - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Datadog Technical Evangelist, Jason Yee’s, talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Dave Rensin: Chaos Engineering for People Systems - Chaos Conf 2019

The following is a transcript from Google Senior Director of Engineering, Dave Rensin’s talk at Chaos Conf 2019, which you can enjoy in the embedded video above. Slides are available here.

Gremlins IRL: Andre Newman, Technical Writer

Andre Newman has been a technical writer at Gremlin for just over three months. In that short time, he’s had a huge impact on the creative output of the team, writing articles about doing Chaos Engineering on Kubernetes, why testing doesn’t stop at staging, and talking about the importance of resilience with The New Stack.

Chaos Engineering: the history, principles, and practice

With the rise of microservices and distributed cloud architectures, the web has grown increasingly complex. We all depend on these systems more than ever, yet failures have become much harder to predict.

Comparing Chaos Engineering tools

In this article, we take an in-depth look at some of the most popular open-source and commercial Chaos Engineering tools in the community.

How to run a GameDay using Gremlin

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to run a GameDay using Gremlin's GameDay feature. We'll walk through creating a GameDay in the Gremlin web application, adding a Scenario, adding teammates to the GameDay, then finally executing the GameDay.

Validating horizontal pod autoscaling on EKS with Gremlin

Scaling is one of the most important functions of a microservices platform. Modern applications must be able to handle changes in demand, and the way to accomplish this is with automatic scaling. Kubernetes provides built-in scalability through its Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), but in order to make the most of HPA, we need to validate that it’s configured optimally for our workloads.

Chaos Engineering using Gremlin on IBM Cloud

Managing the reliability of mission-critical cloud-native applications is a significantly different paradigm than that of traditional Enterprise/N-tier architectures. Container orchestration platforms like IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud do a significant amount of heavy lifting to ensure availability and reliability but they also come with multitude of architectural and configuration options.