Compatibility
The following matrices show the operability of Gremlin on various platforms. Following the compatibility matrices is a list of caveats for installing Gremlin on specific operating systems. At times Gremlin cannot be installed directly on an operating system due to mitigating factors such as dependency issues. In these instances, the matrix shows whether another means of deployment is available and has been tested, such as Docker. Note that you should always apply the latest software updates before installing Gremlin.
Linux
These Linux distributions have been tested to work with Gremlin. All experiment types are available.
- Ubuntu 22.04+
- Debian 11+
- Red Hat 7+
- Fedora 39+
- SUSE 12+
- AWS Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023
Containers and orchestration platforms
Gremlin natively supports Kubernetes, OpenShift, Argo Rollouts, Docker, and many standard container runtimes. Gremlin also supports Istio (via Envoy).
Windows
Gremlin supports the following versions of Microsoft Windows:
Cloud platforms
Gremlin is designed to work on any cloud platform that provides Linux or Windows-based hosts. Gremlin has been tested on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF).
Caveats
Some platforms have limitations or require additional configuration. These caveats are listed below.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)
Gremlin supports infrastructure-level experiments via the Gremlin agent and application-level experiments via Failure Flags
Fedora Atomic
Latency and Packet Loss experiments do not succeed due to an unavailable dependency:
- Tc Error: RTNETLINK answers: No such file or directory
Google Container Optimized OS (COS)
When running network experiments, Gremlin recommends using the latest version of COS. Prior versions of COS did not include kernel modules necessary to apply network impacts. For GKE users, the following minimum versions are recommended:
- 1.15.9-gke.17+
- 1.16.6-gke.5+
Windows
Azure Windows instances may throttle disk I/O such that large disk experiments will take an excessive amount of time to complete.
Client overhead
The Gremlin agent requires very little resources. You can find benchmarks of the agent when idle and under load (i.e. when experiments are running) on the page Gremlin agent resource usage.
Installing Gremlin
Once you've verified compatibility, continue to Installing Gremlin to start the installation process.