Linux host redundancy
Test resilience to host failures by shutting down a randomly selected Linux host. Verify that your platform automatically restarts or replaces it.
Experiment types
Shutdown
Targets
Linux
Length
5 minutes
How this Scenario works
This Scenario shuts down a randomly selected Linux host, simulating an unexpected host failure. This forces your infrastructure to detect the failure and initiate recovery—whether through auto-scaling groups, load balancer health checks, or manual failover processes.
Why run this Scenario?
This Scenario uses the same principle as Chaos Monkey: if a host or container shuts down unexpectedly, the underlying platform should detect this and automatically restart or replace it.
- Validate that Linux instances restart within a reasonable timeframe and workloads successfully migrate to healthy hosts.
- Verify that load balancers automatically route traffic away from the failed Linux host.
- Test that losing a critical node (such as a Kafka broker or database primary) doesn't cause a split-brain scenario.
- Build the same confidence as Netflix's Chaos Monkey approach: if a host shuts down unexpectedly, the platform handles it automatically.
What to expect when you run it
When a Linux host fails, the cloud platform or infrastructure automatically restarts or replaces it, and workloads migrate to healthy instances.
More Scenarios to try
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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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