Seattle, WA -- Microsoft Build, May 19, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gremlin, the company on a mission to help build a more reliable internet, today announced it will become the first hosted solution for running Chaos Engineering experiments on Microsoft Windows. Customers have already widely utilized Gremlin to inject failures across various architectures including Linux, Docker, Kubernetes and serverless functions, both on bare metal and on all major cloud platforms. With 30% of the world’s online systems running on Windows, however, this additional support will continue the company’s mission to democratize the practice of Chaos Engineering.
“We at Gremlin firmly believe that Chaos Engineering is an integral part of any engineering practice, no matter how or where you run your workloads,” said Matthew Fornaciari, CTO and Co-Founder of Gremlin. “While we originally crafted our product for Linux-based distributions, we’ve always had our eye on extending our offering to Windows. We’re thrilled to announce Windows engineers can finally unleash a little controlled chaos on their systems.”
According to Gartner’s report titled Predicts 2020: Agile and DevOps Are Key to Digital Transformation published in December 2019, Chaos Engineering to improve resilience has grown from being an experimental practice among digital natives to gaining traction among large enterprises. “By 2023, 40% of organizations will implement chaos engineering practices as part of DevOps initiatives, reducing unplanned downtime by 20%.” Today’s reality is that even small interruptions in digital services can have large effects on overall business performance. DevOps teams are becoming more involved with key business metrics, as organizations strive to ensure the resilience and recoverability of their production systems.
Highlights
- Gremlin’s Windows Agent currently offers Shutdown, CPU, Disk, I/O, Memory, and Latency attacks
- Run a shutdown attack to test Windows Server Failover clustering and build a robust Active Directory service
- Attack the network to ensure SQL Server replication doesn’t lose data
- Guarantee reliable communications by attacking your Microsoft Exchange Server
“The top priorities for our SRE team this year are improving SLOs and maturing our Chaos Engineering program,” said Bryce Lindsey, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Alaska Airlines. “We’ve been looking forward to leveraging Gremlin’s library of experiments to improve our reliability and performance -- their newly announced support for Windows means we can finally get started.”
Besides enabling users to run individual Chaos Engineering experiments -- such as Chaos-Monkey type attacks that shutdown servers or CPU spikes that simulate traffic bursts -- Gremlin’s Scenarios product will also be available for Windows. Scenarios allow DevOps teams to logically chain attacks together, that better simulate real-world outages which often involve multiple things going wrong simultaneously.
“Using Gremlin is a great way to build up the resiliency of your applications,” said Jay Gordon, Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. “By shifting more of the operations burden upfront, you proactively identify weaknesses instead of reactively solving problems that have already impacted customers.”
About Gremlin
Gremlin is the world’s first hosted chaos engineering service with a mission to help build a more reliable internet. It turns failure into resilience by offering engineers a fully hosted solution to safely experiment on complex systems, in order to identify weaknesses before they impact customers and cause revenue loss. Founded by CEO Kolton Andrus and CTO Matthew Fornaciari in 2016, the company has since raised funding from Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures, and Amplify Partners. Existing customers include Expedia, Mailchimp, Qualtrics, Twilio, Under Armour, and Walmart.
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