Chaos engineering comes to Kubernetes thanks to Gremlin

Kubernetes causes problems. Just last week Cindy Sridharan wrote on Twitter that while Docker "succeeded... because it was a great developer tool," Kubernetes "decided to be all things tech and not much by way of UX. It was and remains a hostile piece of software to learn, run, operate, maintain."

https://twitter.com/copyconstruct/status/1194701905248673792?s=20

That's just a drop in the ocean - you don't have to look hard to find more hot takes, jokes, and memes about how complicated working with Kubernetes can feel.

Despite all this, it's certainly here to stay. That makes chaos engineering platform Gremlin's announcement that the platform will offer native support for Kubernetes particularly welcome. Citing container orchestration research done by Datadog in the press release, which indicates the rapid rate of Kubernetes adoption, Gremlin is hoping that it can provide some additional support for users that might be concerned about the platforms complexity.

From last year: Gremlin makes chaos engineering with Docker easier with new container discovery feature

Gremlin CTO Matt Fornaciari said "our goal is to provide SRE and DevOps teams that are building and deploying modern applications with the tools and processes necessary to understand how their systems handle failure, before that failure has the chance to impact customers and business."

The new feature is designed to help engineers do exactly that by allowing them "to automate the process of identifying Kubernetes primitives such as nodes and pods," and to select and attack traffic from different services within Kubernetes.

The other important element to all this is that Gremlin wants to make things as straightforward as possible for engineering teams. With a neat and easy to use UI, it would seem that, to return to Sridharan's words, the team are eager to make sure their product is "a great developer tool."



 

The tool has already been tried and tested in the wild. Simon Govier, Expedia's Director of Program Management described how performing chaos experiments on Kubernetes with Gremlin "significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to do fault injection and increases our systems' resilience to failure."

Learn more on the Gremlin website.