Worst-case Scenarios? You've got it: Gremlin makes totally trashing your apps even easier

Chaos-engineering company Gremlin has launched Scenarios – "templates of real-world outages" that make it easier to wreck your applications. Gremlin announced the product at the Chaos Conf 2019 taking place in San Francisco. Scenarios include traffic spikes for testing what happens under severe load; unreliable networks for …

[Doctor Syntax]

Chaos Monkey?

Are they using some to test the British political system? It would explain a lot.

[ma1010]

Interesting

Back when I worked at National Australia Bank we did disaster recovery tests. You have to do those to get your banking licence.

Given all the El Reg articles I've read about UK banks' IT system failures, I'm thinking that maybe the UK needs to implement a requirement like Australia's. Did someone say TSB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chaos merchant's failure-as-a-service tests system resilience

> Chaos merchant's failure-as-a-service tests system resilience

Failure And Resilience Testing Service would be a better name.

[Anonymous Coward]

You just described my web browser :-(

"...can consume 100 per cent of CPU, shut down a percentage of your hosts, make DNS calls unresponsive, or introduce severe latency into networks,"

[FuzzyWuzzys]

Speak to some devs who've dealt with users

As a dev you quickly learn that simply handing your app to a bunch of users will very quickly offer you a ton of "feedback" on how poorly planned your pre-release testing was! Expect the unexpected, if it's there then users will find it and break it. It's like letting a bunch of unsupervised 4 year olds lose in your home. We need to harness some that and take it from dev into infra/ops. Let a bunch of users loose on your server stack and then you'll learn really quickly to ensure your backups and DR are working properly.

[Sam3000]

But security...

I look forward to the part where the Gremlin setup gets compromised and hackers DoS all the things using a nice shiny API for convenience...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: But security...

I assume Gremlin has creds to all the boxes to be able to shut them down etc. So they could probably do a lot worse than DoS.

[Claptrap314]

This article brought to you

by Gremlin's PR department.

Seriously, where's the reporting here?

[Mike Henderson]

In real life?

"in the same way as you validate a backup by doing a test restore"

Hahahahaha oh dear hahahahahahahaha "test restore" <helpless laughter>

Next thing, he'll be saying "validate the power system by running the backup diesel jenny for more than half an hour every other Tuesday lunchtime"

ROFLOL

<Wipes tears of laughter from eyes>

Oh dear, where do young people today get these crazy ideas from?

[Ken Moorhouse]

Chaos Monkey is free but can be complex to deploy.

How does one know when it has been deployed properly?

[albegadeep]

Quote from article:

"I like to do a CPU attack first. It's the Hello World of chaos engineering," Butow said.

Awesome line!

When I saw this headline, it took me back to the days of Palm OS programming. There was a program, run in an emulator, called Gremlins. You specified the size of the "horde", number of pen-down or typing events to generate, etc., and it would hammer on the program for a while, using every visible control as well as the occasional tap on the app background. A good way to random-stress-test an app.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/palm-programming-the/1565925254/ch10s07.html