One of the most frustrating moments as a Kubernetes developer is when you go to launch your pod, but it fails to start because of a problem during initialization. Init containers are incredibly useful for setting up a pod before handing it off to the main container, but they introduce an additional point of failure. In this post, we'll take an in-depth look at init containers in Kubernetes: what they are, how they work, how they can fail, and what that means for your Kubernetes deployments.

2023 is coming to a close and the holiday season is here, but that doesn’t mean things at Gremlin are slowing down. In fact, we’ve released a ton of new features and improvements to make testing and improving reliability even easier. Now you can run Chaos Engineering experiments in serverless environments, create custom reliability test suites, create more flexible Scenarios, and more easily identify critical components in your environment.

Building provably reliable systems means building testable systems. Testing for failure conditions is the only way to reliably root out issues before they impact customers. However, most current Chaos Engineering and resilience testing is focused on the underlying infrastructure. This helps identify potentially catastrophic failures, but misses the more frequent failures that still significantly impact customer experience.

Steadybit is a software reliability platform that uses chaos engineering and fault injection to help organizations improve the stability and performance of their applications. By allowing customers to simulate turbulent scenarios in a controlled environment, Steadybit enables you to identify and mitigate potential system issues to reduce downtime and improve resilience.

Last year, we released Reliability Management, a combination of pre-built reliability tests and scoring to give you a consistent way to define, test, and measure progress toward reliability standards across your organization. Today, we fulfill the next stage of that promise with the release of Custom Reliability Test Suites, Custom Scoring, and Dashboards.

Finding, prioritizing, and mitigating security vulnerabilities is an essential part of running software. We’ve all recognized that vulnerabilities exist and that new ones are introduced on a regular basis, so we make sure that we check for and remediate them on a regular basis. Even if the code passed all the security checks before being deployed, you still perform regular security tests to make sure everything’s secure.

You'll often hear the term "containers" used to refer to the entire landscape of self-contained software packages: this includes tools like Docker and Kubernetes, platforms like Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and even the process of building these packages. But there's an even more important layer that often gets overlooked, and that's container images.

It's one of the most dreaded words among Kubernetes users. Regardless of your software engineering skill or seniority level, chances are you've seen it at least once. There are a quarter of a million articles on the subject, and countless developer hours have been spent troubleshooting and fixing it. We're talking, of course, about CrashLoopBackOff.