October 2021 Summaries

Gremlin has launched the Gremlin Certified Chaos Engineering Professional (GCCEPro) certificate program, building on its previous certification to meet the growing demand for skilled Chaos Engineering professionals. This advanced certification offers a deeper understanding of Chaos Engineering best practices and the effective use of Gremlin's platform, with in-depth training materials and a challenging exam. The program includes interactive training and a preparatory webinar, and it emphasizes not only mastering Chaos Engineering concepts but also becoming a proficient user of Gremlin's tools. Participants who pass the exam can easily share their certification on LinkedIn, and a limited-time raffle offers a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift card to the first 500 certified professionals who share their certification posts.

In this podcast episode, Leonardo Murillo, a principal partner solutions architect at Weaveworks, shares insights on DevOps, GitOps, and cloud-native technology, drawing from his experiences in Costa Rica and his past as a DJ. Murillo discusses the importance of automation in enhancing reliability and the evolving role of chaos engineering in software development. He emphasizes how chaos engineering helps identify system vulnerabilities by simulating failure conditions, allowing teams to establish guardrails and increase resilience. Murillo also highlights the OpenGitOps Project, which aims to define GitOps standards and promote consistent practices across the industry. He advocates for wider participation in the cloud-native community, especially from Hispanic and Latinx communities, and introduces his Spanish-language show on cloudnative.tv aimed at making cloud-native technologies more accessible to these audiences.

Disk attacks are a method used to test the resilience of distributed systems by intentionally consuming disk space on storage devices to simulate low disk conditions and analyze system responses. These attacks are useful for verifying that applications can handle low disk space and latency without failure, ensuring that automatic disk cleanup and compression methods are effective, and validating the functionality of dynamic provisioning systems like database sharding. Disk attacks work by writing data to a specified directory until a set percentage of disk usage is reached, and can be configured with parameters such as the number of workers, block size, and volume percentage. This process helps organizations lower operating expenses by dynamically adding storage when necessary and improve detection times for storage-related incidents. Gremlin, the platform discussed in the text, provides tools for running these disk attacks and offers scenarios to guide users through different use cases, emphasizing the importance of recording observations and discussing outcomes to demonstrate the value of these experiments to the organization.

In a podcast episode of "Break Things on Purpose," Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas, co-founders of Temporal, discuss the evolution and impact of their software designed for orchestrating microservices. They trace their journey from working on Simple Workflow Service at AWS to developing Cadence at Uber, which laid the foundation for Temporal. Temporal simplifies the development of reliable, long-running applications by abstracting away complexities like durability, retries, and state management, allowing developers to focus on building applications rather than managing distributed systems intricacies. By rethinking traditional approaches to application design, Temporal aims to provide a more streamlined and developer-friendly experience, ultimately enhancing reliability and operational efficiency. The episode highlights the benefits and unique features of Temporal, emphasizing its ability to handle stateful, long-running processes with ease and reliability.