Building more reliable financial systems with Chaos Engineering

The financial services industry has built in more capital buffers to prevent market shocks from bringing another economic collapse. In addition to these financial controls, many banks and personal trading platforms have begun building resiliency into information technology shocks. Despite these new precautions, we’re still seeing outages today, preventing customers from depositing and withdrawing their money, completing transactions, and executing trades during key events.

Grubhub and JPMC shift reliability testing left at Chaos Conf 2020

Gremlin’s Chaos Conf is always an exciting event, bringing together leaders at the forefront of Chaos Engineering practices. This year was no exception, moving beyond defining Chaos Engineering to more advanced adoption and best practices discussions.

Improve M&A success rates by testing for system reliability

Coming out of recessions, merger and acquisition volume typically picks up as lower interest rates drop the cost of capital and Corporate Development teams begin executing on the strategies they’ve developed during the holding periods. This year has been no exception, with $350 billion spent on tech acquisitions to date. This period is a boon for entrepreneurs seeking exits and for companies trying to expand their businesses into new markets or increase market share.

How to make an ROI calculator and impress finance (an engineer’s guide to ROI)

Think back to the last time you wanted to purchase software for your organization. The software solves real problems and makes your team’s life easier. Then, finance delays or rejects your proposal. What’s going on?

Reliability testing: Definition, history, methods, and examples

Reliability testing is the process of projecting and testing a system’s probability of failure throughout the development lifecycle in order to plan for and reach a required level of reliability, target a decreasing number of failures prior to launch, and to target improvements after launch. That is a difficult mission, especially as systems increase in complexity. The purpose of reliability testing is not to achieve perfection, but to reach a level of reliability that is acceptable before releasing a software product into the hands of customers.

Use Gremlin Webhooks to sync Blazemeter load tests

Using load tests while performing Chaos Engineering experiments prepares your applications for high traffic even in less than ideal system conditions. For example, on a high traffic day, can your application handle a little bit of latency?

Launch and halt Gremlin Chaos Engineering attacks and load testing from JMeter

JMeter is a powerful and flexible load and performance testing tool that can simulate traffic of users clicking through your website or trying your API. But load testing is limited, especially when used in a test or staging environment. Since you're only simulating traffic inside a controlled environment, you’ll have no idea how your site or APIs will handle real world failure modes like a runaway process or latency from a bad network connection. That’s where Chaos Engineering and Gremlin are useful. Using load testing and Chaos Engineering together can simulate traffic load under whatever condition you can imagine so that you feel confident that your application is prepared for anything.

Replicate and monitor CoreDNS issues with Gremlin and Datadog

DNS is at the core of many of the technologies we use today, including Kubernetes service discovery. Without DNS, pods aren’t able to find one another, and their communication breaks down. Luckily, DNS is never a problem. Unfortunately, while the maintainers of CoreDNS, the default DNS provider in Kubernetes, have done an excellent job squashing bugs and solving big problems, DNS is prone to issues. Our systems and teams should be prepared for DNS outages before they arise.

How to safely run experiments with Gremlin’s Status Checks and Datadog Monitoring

Chaos Engineering experiments are controlled, precise attacks designed to reveal weaknesses in our systems. Once your hypothesis is proven or a bug is found, there is no need to continue the attack. If you’re checking your monitoring and alerting, or scheduling scenarios or running them as a part of your pipeline, adding Status Checks is a great way to automatically halt and rollback any impact of an experiment without human intervention. Using Scenarios, we can string together a series of attacks that get close to a set monitor, then halt the attack when the monitor is triggered. This will help us ensure that we’ve set the right monitor for our use case.

Prepare for DNS provider outages with Gremlin and Datadog

Hosted DNS resolver outages are rare, but when they hit, the impact is global. Take the DynDNS outage caused by a DDOS attack or the recent Cloudflare outage caused by a router misconfiguration. Both outages brought many sites, such as Discord and Shopify, to their knees and left customers unable to talk to their friends or sell products.

Highlight Chaos Engineering experiments with AppDynamics and Gremlin webhooks

Chaos Engineering with Gremlin is a powerful way to tune your monitoring to ensure you are gathering actionable data and to train your teams to leverage these tools so that observability expertise isn't siloed in your organization. AppDynamics is an application performance management tool used by companies worldwide to monitor their workloads. Used in combination, these two tools can help you lower your mean time to detection (MTTD) and increase the availability of your applications. This tutorial will walk you through how you can correlate an attack from Gremlin to its impact in AppDynamics.

Visualize Chaos Experiments in Grafana with Gremlin webhooks

Gremlin is a safe, simple, and secure way to run Chaos Engineering on your systems to improve their reliability and tune your monitoring. Grafana is an open source, highly flexible analytics and visualization platform that can ingest data from many data sources and provide powerful dashboards, reports, and alerts. Combined, these two tools can be an effective combination to ensure the dashboards and alerts provided are actionable and useful to reduce mean time to detection (MTTD).

Correlate Chaos Engineering and system impact using Gremlin webhooks and New Relic

When performing chaos experiments, it’s important to correlate the attack with the impact on your system. Webhooks send information about your attack to your monitoring tool of choice. In this way, you can observe from a single pane of glass the timeline of the attack and the reaction of your system. Exporting reports of the results also provides valuable information that can be shared when assessing the reliability of your applications.