Test how your application handles an ElastiCache outage. Run Gremlin network experiments and reliability tests to validate cache-miss handling.
Amazon ElastiCache exists to keep load off your database, which means your database was never sized for the traffic the cache absorbs. That gap is the entire risk, and it is one of the most reliable ways to turn a minor incident into a major one.
A cache outage becomes a database outage in four steps:
- ElastiCache becomes unreachable, and every request that would have been served from memory falls through.
- Your database receives its normal traffic plus everything the cache was absorbing, arriving at once.
- Query times climb, so requests take longer, so concurrency rises, so query times climb further.
- The cache recovers in minutes. The database takes far longer, and the incident review blames the database.
Gremlin lets you measure that gap safely. Blackhole experiments remove the cache endpoint from your application's view while you watch what reaches the database. If the answer is uncomfortable, the mitigations are well understood: request coalescing, stale-while-revalidate, a circuit breaker in front of the database. All of them are easier to build on a Tuesday than during the outage that proves you needed them.
Dependencies: Failure Test
Simulate a failed dependency by dropping all network traffic to the dependency.
Dependencies: Latency Test
Recreate poor network conditions by delaying all network traffic to a dependency by 100ms.
Unreliable Networks - Dependencies
Simulate unreliable network conditions when communicating with dependencies by adding latency to API calls. Test whether your users are affected when dependency response times degrade.
* Testing a dependency doesn't require installing anything on it. Gremlin runs the experiment from the service that calls it, so compatibility depends on that host rather than on the dependency itself. Check our compatibility documentation for supported operating systems and platforms, or get in touch if you don't see yours.
Intelligent Health Checks - AWS
Automatically monitor your AWS services during testing in one-click with Intelligent Health Checks.
AWS integration
Integrate Gremlin with your AWS account for automatic Health Check creation, service discovery, and more.
Using Failure Flags by proxy
Use Failure Flags, Gremlin's application-level fault injection feature, without changing a single line of code.
Installing Gremlin on Amazon ECS
Learn how to install Gremlin on EC2-backed Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) deployments.
Installing Gremlin on AWS - Configuring your VPC
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unique networking requirements that must be implemented for Gremlin to run successfully…
Avoid downtime. Use Gremlin to turn failure into resilience.
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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