Gremlin Scenario: Windows region evacuation

How it works

How this Scenario works

This Scenario drops all network traffic to your Windows hosts in a specified cloud region, simulating a catastrophic regional outage. This forces your global load balancers and DNS-based routing to redirect all traffic to Windows hosts in your backup region(s).

Use cases

Why run this Scenario?

Large-scale infrastructure outages are an unfortunate reality. Power outages happen, storms flood data centers, and curious sharks will snack on data cables. This Scenario tests your systems to see how they handle an entire cloud region suddenly becoming unavailable.

Verify that your backup regions have sufficient Windows host capacity to absorb the full production workload.
Validate that global load balancers and DNS failover detect the regional outage and route traffic correctly.
Test Windows-specific replication and clustering behavior across regions.
Ensure that traffic returns to normal routing once the failed region is back online.

Result

What to expect when you run it

When a region becomes unavailable, traffic automatically fails over to Windows hosts in backup regions, and those regions handle the increased load without impacting the user experience.

Keep going

More Scenarios to try

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Windows packet loss

Ensure your Windows systems can detect and route around resources that fail health checks. This Scenario gradually increases packet loss to validate health check and load balancer behavior.

Windows region evacuation