Gremlin, the world’s first ‘Failure-as-a-Service’ platform, announces new features that help make containerized infrastructure more resilient. In December of 2017, Gremlin launched the first iteration of its platform alongside a $7.5 Million Series A funding round, recreating common failure states within hybrid cloud infrastructure. Now DevOps teams can automatically identify Docker containers with Container Discovery, as well as simulate real-world outages that often have a myriad of root causes with Multiple Attacks, in order to build up the resiliency of containerized environments in production.
“The concept of purposefully injecting failure into systems is still new for many companies, but chaos engineering has been practiced at places like Netflix and Amazon for over a decade,” said Matthew Fornaciari, CTO and Co-Founder of Gremlin. “We like to use the vaccine analogy: injecting small amounts of harm can build immunity that proactively avoids disasters. With today’s updates to the Gremlin platform, DevOps teams will be able to drastically improve the reliability of Docker in production.”
According to Docker Adoption Research based on a sample of 10,000 companies, Docker market share has grown 30% with larger enterprise companies leading adoption. By adding container discovery, engineers can now automate the process of identifying and attacking these containers that are often highly dynamic, ephemeral, and difficult to pinpoint at a given moment. Add orchestrators like Kubernetes and Amazon ECS, and these containers can shift from host to host without human knowledge or intervention, making manual tracking nearly impossible.
“Chaos Engineering has been a big part of our migration to containerized infrastructure,” said Paul Osman, Senior Engineering Manager at Under Armour. “We use Gremlin to test various failure scenarios and build confidence in the resiliency of our microservices. The ability to target containerized services with an easy-to-use UI has reduced the amount of time it takes us to do fault injection significantly.”
The ability to seamlessly run multiple attacks on containerized infrastructure via Gremlin’s intuitive user-interface (UI) also helps companies simulate real-world failures that are often unpredictable and multi-faceted. IHS Markit, in its comprehensive report The Cost of Server, Application, and Network Downtime, revealed that downtime is costing North American organizations $700 billion per year. Per-company figures provided by Gartner, a leading research and advisory company and a member of the S&P 500, cite the average cost of downtime at $300,000 per hour, or $5,600 per minute.
