Gremlin Certified Chaos Engineering Practitioner Exam preparation guide

Gremlin

Chaos Engineer

Last Updated: May 31, 2022

Categories: Chaos Engineering

Welcome to the Gremlin Certified Chaos Engineering Practitioner (GCCEP) Exam preparation guide! The exam covers 20 questions and will take you approximately 30 min to complete. Click here to enroll in the exam. The topics covered in the exam include:

• The Theory of Chaos Engineering
• Using Gremlin to practice Chaos Engineering

To prepare for this exam, we recommend not just reading up on these topics, but to learn by doing. You can sign up for a free Gremlin trial account by clicking this link. Make sure to specify that your account is for certification purposes in the drop-down. If you are an AWS customer, you can also try out Gremlin on the AWS marketplace.

Lab Environments

These resources will help you set up a test environment for getting hands-on experience with Gremlin.

• Gremlin Playground is a virtual machine image for VirtualBox containing a full installation of the Gremlin agent and an example application. This is the easiest way to get started, but it requires VirtualBox.
• How to Install and Use Gremlin Locally with Kubernetes walks you through deploying the Gremlin agent onto a Kubernetes cluster. This tutorial works for any cluster using the Containerd, CRI-O, or Docker runtimes.
• How to Install and Use Gremlin with EKS walks you through deploying the Gremlin agent onto an Amazon EKS cluster.
• How to Install and Use Gremlin with Google Cloud Shell and Kubernetes walks you through deploying the Gremlin agent and an example application on a minikube cluster on Google Cloud Platform.

Recommended Reading

These resources will give you more info on Chaos Engineering, Gremlin, and the different use cases and applications of Chaos Engineering.

• Chaos Engineering: the history, principles, and practice: this tutorial presents the full history of Chaos Engineering, key concepts, and how organizations have successfully adopted it.
• Gremlin Scenarios: learn how to create and run a Scenario using Gremlin. A Scenario is a sequence of Gremlin attacks and Status Checks that you can use to recreate past outages or iteratively grow the blast radius of an experiment.
• Gremlin Agent Overview: this article explains how the Gremlin daemon works. The daemon is the binary that connects hosts to the Gremlin Control Plane.
• Gremlin Command Line Interface: the Gremlin CLI allows you to perform actions directly from a host running the Gremlin agent.
• Testing disaster recovery with Chaos Engineering: this tutorial explains Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) and how you can test a DRP plan using Gremlin.
• Reducing MTTD for High-Severity Incidents: This ebook introduces the fundamentals of incident management classification and how SRE teams can reduce their time to detection.

Recommended Watching

• What is Chaos Engineering?
• Chaos Engineering: The Path to Reliability
• What is Gremlin?
• Chaos Engineering in 60 seconds - Scheduled Shutdown Attack (aka Chaos Monkey)
• Building Reliability One Step at a Time: https://webinars.devops.com/building-reliability-one-step-at-a-time

Recommended Listening

• Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Ep. 9: Kolton Andrus, CEO and Co-Founder at Gremlin: https://www.gremlin.com/blog/podcast-break-things-on-purpose-ep-9-kolton-andrus-ceo-and-co-founder-at-gremlin/
• Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Ep. 7: Matthew Simons, Senior Product Development Manager at Workiva: https://www.gremlin.com/blog/podcast-break-things-on-purpose-ep-7-matthew-simons-senior-product-development-manager-at-workiva/
• Database Chaos with Tammy Butow: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/04/10/database-chaos-with-tammy-butow/
• Incident Reproduction with Tammy Butow: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/10/16/incident-reproduction-with-tammy-butow/

We wish you the best of luck preparing for your examination!