Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Testing shouldn’t feel risky. While it might sound counterintuitive, certain types of testing can actually increase risks to your systems. Load testing, for example, is a great way to see how your systems behave under pressure, but it can also cause those same systems to fail if they aren’t equipped to handle the load. For some types of testing, this is necessary, as is the case with reliability testing and Chaos Engineering.

You’re well on your way to becoming more reliable. You’ve added your services, found and fixed some Detected Risks, and run your first set of reliability tests. However, some of your tests returned as “Failed.” Not to worry: this isn’t a reflection of you or your engineering skills but rather an opportunity to learn more about how your systems work and, more importantly, how to make them more resilient.

Cloud providers like AWS excel at creating reliable platforms for developers to build on. But while the platforms may be rock-solid, this doesn’t guarantee your applications will be too. It’s the provider’s job to offer stable infrastructure, but you’re still on the hook for making your workloads resilient, recoverable, and fault-tolerant. There’s only one problem: cloud platforms are essentially black boxes.

Reliability doesn’t happen by itself. Making a system reliable and resilient enough that your customers can count on it takes a combination of time, effort, and resources that could be used elsewhere, such as shipping new features. It’s also not optional. In an era where downtime costs an average of $14,056/min (or $843,360/hr), outages have a material impact on businesses. Unfortunately, most systems are sprawling and complex enough that even small amounts of downtime can add up quickly.

Reliability testing is ongoing work, and tracking that work can be difficult in large organizations. Engineers run one-off experiments, scheduled Scenarios run in the background, and, for more mature teams, CI/CD workflows fire off automated tests on demand. According to our own product metrics, teams run an average of 200 to 500 tests each day! With so much happening, it’s hard to keep track of everything going on in Gremlin—until now.