Chaos engineering company Gremlin is introducing an easier way for DevOps teams to start using chaos engineering. According to the company, chaos engineering is an approach to detecting failures before outages happen.
“With the ongoing migration to microservice, serverless, and cloud environments, we believe the industry has answered ‘why do chaos engineering,’ and has begun asking ‘how do I begin practicing Chaos Engineering’ in order to significantly increase the reliability and resiliency of our systems to provide the best user experience possible,” Lorne Kligerman, director of product at Gremlin, wrote in a post.
The new solution, Gremlin Free, offers the ability to shut down server at random, and can target specific hosts and simulate CPU spikes for more focused experiments and simulations.
The company explained Gremlin Free also features a simple UI, a halt button so that users can rollback attacks, and advanced security not included in many of the current open-source solutions.
Companies that are proactive and regularly run chaos engineering tests can reportedly save millions of dollars per year by preventing outages, the company said. According to Gartner, downtime costs an average of $5,600 per minute, which is equivalent to $336,000 per hour.
“Similar to a flu shot, the idea is to purposefully inject a controlled bit of harm in order to build up an immunity,” said Kligerman. “It’s still a new concept to most engineering teams, so we wanted to offer a free version of our software that helps them become more familiar with Chaos Engineering — both from a tooling and culture perspective.”
