Gremlin and GCP App Engine Standard

Test App Engine Standard reliability with Gremlin Failure Flags. Inject latency and errors into your application to validate dependency handling.

App Engine Standard is among the oldest managed runtimes still in wide use, and its longevity is the issue. Applications deployed a decade ago still serve traffic, written against constraints that have since changed, maintained by people who inherited rather than built them.

Their dependency handling reflects that vintage. Synchronous calls throughout, retries that assume failures are brief, timeouts left at framework defaults nobody chose. The platform's reliability is what allowed those choices to go unexamined, and it's also what keeps them invisible.

Add Failure Flags to your application and inject latency or errors into a specific dependency call. What comes back is something these applications almost never have: current, observed documentation of how they behave under stress.

For systems where the original context has left the building, measured behavior is worth considerably more than whatever written record survives.

Building resilience on App Engine Standard with Gremlin

App Engine Standard is an application platform (or PaaS), which you can test using the Failure Flags sidecar * and the experiments shown on the right. You can use Failure Flags to prepare your services for application-level failure modes on App Engine Standard, such as:

High-latency function calls due to slow dependencies or high processing times
Validating error and exception handling logic
Experiments isolated to specific environments, customers, or any other application-level attributes

You can also run these expert-built workflows designed to replicate real-world failure modes on App Engine Standard:

Dependencies: Failure Test

Simulate a failed dependency by dropping all network traffic to the dependency.

Try it

Dependencies: Latency Test

Recreate poor network conditions by delaying all network traffic to a dependency by 100ms.

Try it

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.

Try it

* Failure Flags works wherever you can add the SDK to your application and run the Gremlin sidecar. Not every language and platform combination has been individually tested, and not all are officially supported. Check our compatibility documentation for what's verified, or get in touch if you don't see your runtime.

Learn more about Gremlin and App Engine Standard

Intelligent Health Checks - GCP

Automatically monitor your Google Cloud services during testing in one-click with Intelligent Health Checks.

Read

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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