
Gremlin’s “Failure as a Service” makes it easy to find weaknesses in your system before they cause problems for your customers. Gremlin is a simple, safe and secure way to use Chaos Engineering to improve system resilience. This tutorial will provide a walkthrough of the following:
Prerequisites Before you begin this tutorial, you’ll need the following:
In this step, you’ll use GCE to setup a new instance to use with Gremlin. Google Compute Engine (GCE) lets you use virtual machines that run on Google's infrastructure.
First, log in to Google Cloud Console and proceed to Compute Engine, create a project to continue. Now let’s create the instance we need, name it as you please and use the region that is closest to you. For Machine Type, we’ve selected 4 vCPUS / 15 GB Memory and for Boot disk select the ‘Ubuntu 16.04 LTS’ image with standard persistent disk of 10GB.
After this, press the ‘Create’ button to create the instance.
While on the 'VM Instances' tab, find the instance you’ve just created, click the SSH button and a pop-up window will open. We are now connected to the server you’ve created and can now install Gremlin!
In this step, you'll install Gremlin
First, ssh into your host and add the gremlin repo:
1ssh username@your_server_ip23echo "deb https://deb.gremlin.com/ release non-free" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gremlin.list
Import the GPG key:
1sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C81FC2F43A48B25808F9583BDFF170F324D41134 9CDB294B29A5B1E2E00C24C022E8EF3461A50EF6
Then install the Gremlin agent:
1sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y gremlin gremlind
After you have created your Gremlin account (sign up here) you will need to find your Gremlin Daemon credentials. Login to the Gremlin App using your Company name and sign-on credentials. These were emailed to you when you signed up to start using Gremlin.
Navigate to Team Settings and click on your Team. Make a note of your Gremlin Secret and Gremlin Team ID.
Then initialise Gremlin and follow the prompts:
1gremlin init
You are now ready to create attacks using the Gremlin App.
We are going to use the Gremlin Control Panel to run a CPU Attack, you can also use the API or the CLI to do so. There are various attacks of attacks you can run using Gremlin, check out the list here. The CPU attack is the ‘Hello World’ of Chaos Engineering, it generates high load for one or more CPU cores. For “Choose the Targets”, we will select ‘Host’ and use 10.142.0.2.
We now have to Choose a Gremlin, the CPU attack is found under the “Resource” Gremlins. I’ve filled out the form for the attack to run on one core for 60 seconds.
Make sure to press the green ‘Unleash Gremlin’ button to unleash your first gremlin! While your attack is running you can run this command to see the gremlin attack in action:
1top
On the top, these processes displayed:
18160 gremlin 20 0 37736 9856 6180 S 99.7 0.1 0:16.30 gremlin22682 gremlin 20 0 44720 11936 5632 S 0.7 0.1 0:16.68 gremlind
You've now set up an instance using GCE, installed Gremlin and unleashed your first Gremlin. Feel free to explore around using the other gremlins, you can learn about the full range of gremlins available at Gremlin Attacks.
Gremlin empowers you to proactively root out failure before it causes downtime. See how you can harness chaos to build resilient systems by requesting a demo of Gremlin.
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