Disaster recovery plans have always been a crucial part of businesses—especially essential services like banks. These plans help keep your business up and running during a disaster or extreme scenario so you can be there for your customers when they need you the most.

Serverless platforms make it incredibly easy to deploy applications. You can take raw code, push it up to a service like AWS Lambda, and have a running application in just a few seconds. The serverless platform provider assumes responsibility for hosting and operating the platform, freeing you up to focus on your application. Naturally, this raises a question: if something goes wrong, who’s responsible?

The way the story goes is that in the old days Amazon used to cut power to data centers so they could see if their services were actually redundant across different data centers; and that they only abandoned this practice when EC2 customers started to complain (no matter how many times they were warned their instances might disappear without notice). This story may be apocryphal, but you don’t need to be worried about power loss outages in order to have a given data center go down.

Gremlin’s default suite of reliability tests analyzes critical functions of modern services: scalability, redundancy, and resilience to dependency failures. Services that pass this suite of tests can be trusted to remain available during unexpected incidents. But what happens when a service fails a test? How do you take failed test results and turn them into actionable insights? This blog aims to answer that question.

Over the past year, the Gremlin team has focused on giving you more tools to adapt Gremlin to your organization’s reliability needs. We started with customizable reliability tests, and now, we’ve released customizable role-based access controls (RBAC). We’ve also made it easier to target specific availability zones when running Failure Flags experiments, and to run experiments behind a proxy. Keep reading to learn more! ‍

Kubernetes just celebrated its tenth birthday. That’s 10 years of microservices, containers, service meshes, and many other paradigms that are now common to many developers’ toolkits.

Resilient and reliable IT systems have become a minimum requirement for modern businesses—a fact driven home by any number of high-profile outages over the past few years. Unfortunately, when those outages are in the financial sector, it can have far-reaching and incredibly damaging results.

Note In this blog, we use “managed service providers” to refer to companies that provide hosted computing services, not managed IT service providers (MSPs). ‍ When was the last time you thought about the reliability of your cloud dependencies? The biggest challenge with using cloud platforms and SaaS services is also its biggest strength: the provider controls everything.

Reliability testing and Chaos Engineering are essential for finding reliability risks and improving the resiliency of systems. Gremlin makes it easy to do so, but not every engineer needs access to the same experiments, systems, or services. That’s why we released customizable role-based access controls (RBAC), letting Gremlin customers control which actions your users can perform in Gremlin.

Encryption is a fundamental part of nearly every modern application, whether you’re storing data, sending data to customers, or sharing data between backend services. Most organizations have a data encryption strategy, and nearly every web page is using HTTPS, thanks to initiatives like Let’s Encrypt. But setting up encryption isn’t a one-time initiative. Over time, the certificates backing modern encryption expire and need to be replaced.