Test how your application handles a Cloud Spanner outage. Run Gremlin network experiments and reliability tests to validate multi-region failover.
Google Cloud Spanner delivers global consistency, and the price is paid in latency. Writes coordinate across replicas, and where those replicas sit relative to your application determines how long that takes. Teams choose a multi-region configuration for availability without always pricing in what it does to write latency under normal conditions, let alone degraded ones.
When a region becomes unreachable, coordination slows further. Gremlin lets you find out what your application does in that window. With Gremlin, you can:
- Confirm your write timeouts survive degraded coordination. A latency experiment slows the path to Spanner so you can see whether timeouts tuned against best-case performance start failing writes that would have succeeded.
- Test regional failover for real. A blackhole experiment removes a regional endpoint and shows whether your application reconnects on its own and how long it takes.
- Check where stale reads end up. Replication lag is fine for a report and unacceptable for a balance check. Testing reveals which of your read paths can tolerate it.
Both your timeout values and your read routing looked reasonable when someone set them. Testing is what tells you whether the conditions they assumed still hold.
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.
* 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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