Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2024

How role-based access control (RBAC) works in Gremlin

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.

Build reliability efforts into your regular engineering schedule

Improving reliability might seem daunting, but you'd be surprised how much impact you can have with a relatively light lift. "Reliability doesn't need to be everybody stopped the world for a month, kind of a tech debt thing. If we spent 20 minutes a week, we could actually save ourselves a ton of time over the course of the year. The business needs to be efficient and agile, but it's important that the reliability is there. And so we really need people to be able to react quickly, adapt, and do a little bit along the way.

How to balance reliability with other DevOps priorities

Reliability efforts do take up some bandwidth, but in the end it's worth it—as our customers find out when their outage costs go down. "Everyone has their own priorities that they're dealing with. Given unlimited time and money, absolutely everyone would want to build the best possible system that is the most secure, performant, resilient, and everything.

How to Build Resilience Throughout Your SDLC Lessons from a Top 10 Bank

Are your applications as reliable as you planned? How do you know? The only way to ensure systems are resilient to common failure conditions is to test them, yet many large enterprises struggle with the effort and expense to do so. In this webinar, Anantha Movva, a former head of SRE and Performance Engineering at one of the top 10 North American banks, will share how he drove Chaos Engineering and resilience testing adoption throughout his organization.

Software reliability and availability is the whole team's problem-not just a few engineers

Reliability is everyone's problem—not just the SRE team's. "It's not just the SRE's problem. It's everybody's problem. So the SREs, they can run point and they can help report and help us understand, but we also have to hold the teams accountable. Are the teams investing time in reliability? Are they finding and fixing issues? Are we giving them space? And I think that comes back to, does the business see the benefit and do we have a good way of quantifying the benefit to the business?"—Kolton Andrus, Gremlin CTO.

Testing for expiring TLS and SSL certificates using 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.

Spend a little time on software reliability now instead of a lot of time later

You're going to spend time fixing reliability—but it's your choice whether it's during an outage or ahead of time on your schedule and for less costs. Which will you choose? "We all know when things go wrong, it cost us a million dollars and it was really bad. Let's have that never happen again. But when we say, I need every engineering team to spend one hour, one day a week on reliability, does everyone lose their mind, or is that a reasonable request? Can we amortize out the cost of that?

How to run fault injection tests on AWS managed services

Part of the Gremlin Office Hours series: A monthly deep dive with Gremlin experts. Fully-managed SaaS services offer incredible scalability and accessibility, but at a cost: they’re also single points of failure. If your application depends on a SaaS service and the service fails, guess who your customers will blame? We need to design applications to anticipate and work around managed service failures, but how do we do that without having to wait for the service to fail?

How to load-balance across multiple availability zones for improved redundancy

Load balancers are some of the most important load-bearing (pun intended) components in cloud environments. They perform multiple critical tasks: network switching, packet inspection, and of course, routing. Most cloud-based load balancers focus on load balancing within a single zone, but what if you have resources spread across multiple zones?

Gremlin's API makes it easy to integrate testing in your CI/CD pipeline

Thinking about integrating Gremlin into your existing pipeline? Look no farther than the Gremlin API. "The next step then was to build the right tooling such that the resiliency tests can be run from a pipeline. Gremlin's API first approach made it possible to do this in a very easy manner because everything that we could do from the UI and manually, we could replicate all of that through the API as well.

Intelligent Health Checks: one-click observability for reliability tests

Reliability testing and observability are similar in one important way: engineering teams know they should be doing it, but they’re not sure how to start, or they don’t have the right resources, or they need to focus on competing priorities like feature development and incident response. In an ideal world, reliability and observability would be automated processes that configure, monitor, and run themselves.

What is the Well-Architected Cloud Test Suite?

When it comes to reliability, cloud providers use a Shared Responsibility Model. In essence, they’ll keep the infrastructure reliable, while you’re responsible for architecting reliability into your systems. To help make this easier, they’ve published a variety of best practice guides, such as the AWS Well-Architected Framework. These lengthy documents are filled with recommendations to help you architect a more secure, more reliable system.

How to prevent accidental load balancer deletions

The worst thing you could do after successfully deploying to a new environment is to accidentally delete critical infrastructure. Unfortunately, that happened to one Google Cloud customer when their private cloud subscription was accidentally deleted, resulting in nearly two weeks of downtime. This isn’t an isolated problem either: Microsoft Azure had a similar problem when a typo inadvertently deleted an entire SQL Server instance rather than a specific database.