PowerfulSeal is a testing tool for Kubernetes clusters built by Bloomberg and inspired by Netflix’s Chaos Monkey.
The tool, which was first presented at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017, is aimed specifically at Kubernetes, and includes the ability to describe the objects running in each container so that it knows precisely which things it needs to break for testing purposes.
It also includes an interactive mode that allows systems engineers to to see how it behaves on their clusters to build their own testing policies.
“You can just point it at a cluster and ask it to delete things, take things up and down, and execute arbitrary commands,” said Mikolaj Pawlikowski, a London-based software engineer with Bloomberg’s Data Technologies team. “It lets you get a good idea of how resilient the application is, and then, with that experience, you can write policies in YAML and deploy them.”
Users can then fine-tune the applications including the time of day, probability, how much of the application to break, or where to break it.
PowerfulSeal currently includes drivers for Kubernetes clusters running on OpenStack, but Pawlowski said he’s hopeful that the open source community will create drivers to use with other cloud platforms.
Additional details are available here.
