April 2019 Summaries

Gremlin's integration with Spinnaker allows users to automate chaos experiments by incorporating a Gremlin stage into their continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, enhancing the automation of chaos engineering tasks. This integration aims to provide software engineering teams with the ability to automate testing of system reliability and prevent regressions by introducing chaos experiments, which complement traditional unit and integration tests. By simulating failures in a controlled environment, teams can identify and mitigate potential risks before they affect end users, thereby improving system stability and reducing the likelihood of outages. The integration supports all Gremlin accounts and encourages the use of automated chaos experiments as a method to ensure application health and reliability, offering users a comprehensive suite of tools to increase the resilience of their systems.

Gremlin's Chaos Engineering platform has introduced a novel attack type known as the "Space Gremlin," which is designed to simulate the challenges of physical space consumption within a modern organization. This new Gremlin was inspired by real-world scenarios, such as a VP of Sales using large conference rooms as personal offices, leading to disruptions in meeting schedules and engineering work. The Space Gremlin can be configured to consume a specified percentage of available space in a target area, such as a conference room, allowing teams to identify dependencies on physical space and enhance system reliability. This addition aims to provide an innovative layer of chaos engineering, helping organizations uncover and address potential availability risks, while the platform continues to offer a range of infrastructure and application-level attacks. The Space Gremlin was humorously released in conjunction with April Fool's Day, adding a playful twist to the serious business of improving system reliability.