Gremlin Scenario: Windows host zone redundancy

How it works

How this Scenario works

This Scenario drops network traffic between your Windows hosts in one availability zone and the rest of your infrastructure, simulating a complete zone outage. This forces your load balancers and routing mechanisms to redirect traffic to Windows hosts in the remaining zones.

Use cases

Why run this Scenario?

Demonstrate that your Windows infrastructure is truly zone-redundant, not just deployed across multiple zones.
Verify that load balancers detect the zone outage and redirect traffic to healthy Windows hosts in other zones.
Test whether your secondary zones have enough Windows host capacity to handle the traffic surge from the failed zone.
Ensure that Windows failover clustering and traffic routing return to normal when the zone recovers.

Result

What to expect when you run it

When a zone fails, Windows hosts in secondary zones automatically absorb the traffic with no interruption in service.

Keep going

More Scenarios to try

Kubernetes packet loss

Ensure your Kubernetes systems can detect and route around resources that fail health checks. This Scenario gradually increases packet loss to validate liveness/readiness probe and load balancer behavior.

Container packet loss

Ensure your containerized 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 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 host zone redundancy