Test AWS Lightsail reliability with Gremlin. Simulate CPU, Memory, and Shutdown experiments to validate application resilience under load.
Lightsail workloads have a habit of becoming more important than anyone planned. A service starts as an internal tool or a prototype, quietly accumulates users, and ends up handling something the business depends on. The infrastructure review that would have caught a single point of failure never happened, because at the time nothing was at stake.
Nobody revisits these environments on purpose. There's no deployment ceremony to prompt a resilience discussion and often no runbook, so the first real assessment of the instance happens after it's already down and someone is trying to remember how it was configured.
Testing a Lightsail instance takes very little effort and answers the questions that matter for a workload in this position: how quickly you'd notice an outage, how the application behaves under load it wasn't sized for, and how long recovery actually takes. If any of those answers are uncomfortable, that's useful information about whether it still belongs on Lightsail at all.
CPU scalability - Linux
Test that your Linux-hosted service scales as expected when CPU capacity is limited. Gremlin consumes CPU in three stages—50%, 75%, and 90%—to validate scaling thresholds.
Scalability: Memory
Verify that your Linux-hosted service scales as expected when memory is limited. Gremlin increases memory utilization in three stages—50%, 75%, and 90%—to validate memory management.
Host failure - Linux
Prepare for Linux host failures by shutting down a percentage of your hosts and observing the results. Validate that your infrastructure handles host loss without impacting service availability.
Validate Health Checks - Packet Loss - Linux
Ensure your Linux systems can detect and route around resources that fail health checks. This Scenario gradually increases packet loss to validate health check and load balancer behavior.
* Gremlin is designed to work on any cloud platform that provides Linux or Windows hosts. We haven't individually tested every service we cover, and not all are officially supported. Check our compatibility documentation for tested operating systems and known caveats, 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.
Troubleshooting Failure Flags
Diagnose and resolve common issues with Failure Flags, Gremlin's application-based fault injection feature.
Using Failure Flags by proxy
Use Failure Flags, Gremlin's application-level fault injection feature, without changing a single line of code.
Reliability Intelligence: Spread load across replicas to reduce error spikes
Reduce error spikes during replica termination by spreading traffic more evenly across a larger number of pods.
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…
Amazon CloudWatch Health Check
Learn how to monitor the health of your systems during testing by using your existing AWS CloudWatch alarms.
Deploying Failure Flags on AWS ECS
This document will walk you through setting up Failure-Flags-Sidecar for your ECS Tasks. Failure-Flags-Sidecar runs…
Deploying Failure Flags on AWS Lambda
This document will walk you through setting up the Failure Flags agent for Lambda Functions. The Failure Flags agent…
Failure Flags
Gremlin Failure Flags lets you run Chaos Engineering experiments and reliability tests on serverless workloads…
Scenarios
A Scenario is a set of Health Checks and Gremlin experiments that you can define, along with a name, description…
Experiments
An experiment is a method of injecting failure into a system in a simple, safe, and secure way. Learn how easy it is to run experiments in Gremlin.
Targets
A target is any infrastructure or application resource that you can run experiments on. This can include Amazon EC…
Services
Gremlin tests your services to ensure they're resilient to traffic surges, network latency, cloud provider blackouts, and more. Learn how in our docs.
Configuring the Gremlin Agent
This documentation page shows you how to configure the Gremlin Agent. You can configure Gremlin using either environment…
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.
