Test GKE Autopilot reliability with Gremlin Failure Flags. Inject latency and errors into pods to validate application-layer resilience.
GKE Autopilot hands management of your Kubernetes cluster to Google entirely. Capacity, scheduling, and node health stop being your problem, and the layer most Kubernetes teams use for resilience testing stops being available. However, pods can still fail, and GKE manages your cluster, not what runs on it.
Gremlin tests the layer you still control. Deploy Failure Flags alongside your pods and you can start testing resilience, no node access required. With Gremlin, you can:
- Check that readiness reflects reality. A pod stalled on a downstream call stays ready and keeps receiving traffic. Inject latency into that call and watch whether your probes notice, or whether Autopilot keeps routing requests to a pod that can't serve them.
- Contain failures to one service. Shared thread pools and missing circuit breakers can turn one slow API into a cluster-wide slowdown that only becomes apparent during a failure. Inject errors into a single dependency and confirm that the blast radius stops there.
- Score every service the same way. Autopilot removes your ability to compare clusters on node configuration, which makes application-level reliability scoring more valuable, not less. Reliability scores give each service a number your teams can understand and act on.
Autopilot manages your nodes. Your application still determines what a customer experiences when a dependency slows down.
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.
* 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.
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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