Chaos engineering company Gremlin launches Scenarios, making it easier to tackle downtime issues

At the second ChaosConf in San Francisco, Gremlin CEO Kolton Andrus revealed the company's latest step in its war against downtime: 'Scenarios.'

Scenarios makes it easy for engineering teams to simulate a common issues that lead to downtime. It's a natural and necessary progression for Gremlin that is seeing even the most forward thinking teams struggling to figure out how to implement chaos engineering in a way that's meaningful to their specific use case.

"Since we released Gremlin Free back in February thousands of customers have signed up to get started with chaos engineering," said Andrus. "But many organisations are still struggling to decide which experiments to run in order to avoid downtime and outages."

Scenarios, then, is a useful way into chaos engineering for teams that are reticent about taking their first steps. As Andrus notes, it makes it possible to inject failure "with a couple of clicks."

What failure scenarios does Scenarios let engineering teams simulate?

Scenarios lets Gremlin users simulate common issues that can cause outages. These include:

• Traffic spikes (think Black Friday site failures)
• Network failures
• Region evacuation

This provides a great starting point for anyone that wants to stress test their software. Indeed, it's inevitable that these issues will arise at some point so taking advance steps to understand what the consequences could be will minimise their impact - and their likelihood.

Why chaos engineering?

Over the last couple of years plenty of people have been attempting to answer why chaos engineering?

But in truth the reasons are clear: software - indeed, the internet as we know it - is becoming increasingly complex, a mesh of interdependent services and platforms. At the same time, the software being developed today is more critical than ever. For eCommerce sites downtime means money, but for those in IoT and embedded systems world (like self-driving cars, for example), it's sometimes a matter of life and death. This makes Gremlin's Scenarios an incredibly exciting an important prospect - it should end the speculation and debate about whether we should be doing chaos engineering, and instead help the world to simply start doing it.

At ChaosConf Andrus said that Gremlin's mission is to build a more reliable internet. We should all hope they can deliver.