Test how your application handles a Cloud CDN outage. Run Gremlin network experiments and reliability tests to validate origin failover under cache-miss storms.
The value of Google Cloud CDN is that most requests never reach your origin. That's also what makes it load-bearing in a way that's easy to underestimate, because your origin is sized for the small fraction of traffic that gets through rather than all of it.
When edge caching degrades, that fraction changes in seconds:
- Requests that were served from the edge start arriving at your origin instead.
- Origin capacity, provisioned for a fraction of total traffic, saturates almost immediately.
- Response times climb, so requests take longer, so concurrency rises, so response times climb further.
- The origin starts failing, which means nothing repopulates the cache, and the situation compounds rather than recovering.
Gremlin lets you measure that surge before it happens. A blackhole experiment against edge endpoints sends traffic straight to your origin while you watch what it can absorb. A latency experiment simulates degraded edge performance, the more common and subtler version of the same problem.
If your origin can't survive losing edge coverage, the fixes are well understood: more capacity, origin shielding, or a deliberate degradation strategy. Choosing between them requires the actual number.
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.
TLS/SSL certificate expiration - Dependencies
Check for expiring TLS certificates on your dependencies by advancing the system clock forward one day, one week, and one month. Detect certificates that will expire before they cause outages.
* 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 - GCP
Automatically monitor your Google Cloud services during testing in one-click with Intelligent Health Checks.
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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