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Getting started with IO attacks

Storage devices remain one of the most significant bottlenecks in modern systems. CPU and RAM speed seems to increase exponentially year over year, and although there have been large improvements in IO performance with solid state (SSD) and NVMe drives, moving data to and from persistent storage is still orders of magnitude slower than moving it to and from memory. In scalable cloud applications, this slowness can have a major impact on performance, latency, and the user experience.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Gustavo Franco, Senior Engineering Manager at VMWare

In this episode Jason is joined by Gustavo Franco, Senior Engineering Manager at VMWare, to chat about chaos in the Gustavo’s early days. Gustavo reflects on Googles early disaster recovery practices, to the contemporary SRE movement.

Announcing the Gremlin Chaos Engineering Professional Certificate Program

There’s a reason why thousands of Engineers, Testers, and other Reliability specialists signed up for Gremlin’s first Gremlin Certified Chaos Engineering Practitioner (GCCEP) certificate program: Chaos Engineering is in high demand, and the market is looking for professionals who know how to wield it well.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Leonardo Murillo, Principal Partner Solutions Architect at Weaveworks

Sit down with Ana and Jason for this week's show with Leonardo (Leo) Murillo, principal partner solutions architect at Weaveworks, and former DJ, who joins us from Costa Rica. Leo shares his take on GitOps, offers a lot of excellent resources to check out, and shares his thoughts on automating reliability. He also defines how to account for the “DJ variable” and “party parameters” alongside some fun anecdotes on DevOps.

Getting started with Disk attacks

Persistent storage is one of the more difficult aspects of managing distributed systems. When we attach a storage device to a host—whether it’s flash storage, network attached storage (NAS), or old fashioned spinning disks—we generally don’t give it much thought until we start running distributed applications or need to increase capacity. But there’s more that can go wrong with storage, and this can have unexpected consequences for our systems, services, and applications.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas, creators of Temporal

Join Jason for another round of “Build Things on Purpose.” This time Jason is joined by Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas, co-founders of Temporal, to talk about the software and solutions they are developing for orchestrating micro services. Maxim and Samar talk about their joint work in the past on various projects to include the Cadence project, which has laid the foundation for what they are continuing to do at Temporal.

Getting started with Memory attacks

Memory (or RAM, short for random-access memory) is a critical computing resource that stores temporary data on a system. Memory is a finite resource, and the amount of memory available determines the number and complexity of processes that can run on the system. Running out of RAM can cause significant problems such as system-wide lockups, terminated processes, and increased disk activity. Understanding how and when these issues can happen is vital to creating stable and resilient systems.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | John Martinez, Director of Cloud R&D at Palo Alto Networks

In this episode Jason is joined by John Martinez, Director of Cloud R&D at Palo Alto Networks, to talk about the FinOps Foundation and the vast range of optimization opportunities to reduce spend in the cloud. John comes in with some extremely useful insights into how FinOps is laid out and their use of a “crawl, walk, run approach.” John and Jason discuss multi cloud and go into the specifics on the costs associated with multi cloud as well the security changes that will come with.

Getting started with CPU attacks

The CPU attack is one of the most common attack types run by Gremlin users. CPU attacks let you consume CPU capacity on a host, container, Kubernetes resource, or service. This might sound like a trivial exercise, but consuming even small amounts of CPU can reveal unexpected behaviors on our systems. These behaviors can manifest as poor performance, unresponsiveness, or instability.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Omar Marrero, Chaos and Performance Engineering Lead at Kessel Run

In this episode, we chat with Omar Marrero, Chaos and Performance Engineering Lead at Kessel Run, a company at the forefront of delivering “combat capability that can sense and respond to any conflict in any domain, anytime, anywhere.” To say that Omar and Kessel Run are at the forefront is an understatement.