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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

Are you recognizing the good work engineers do to prevent outages? "The people that are out there doing good work to prevent fires from ever occurring, we're not often recognizing them. We're not often rewarding them. And once things go wrong, someone comes in and fixes it. That's great. That's needed. But we're rewarding that behavior. And so it becomes a bit of people are motivated by what behavior you reward.

Did you know you can use the Gremlin API to integrate resiliency tests into your CI/CD pipeline? Our partner Nagarro has even made it part of their shift left package. "What we do is shift left and add a chaos stage to the pipeline. We have created the shift left accelerator package. It integrates with load tests and Gremlin APIs to set up the test scenario.

Gremlin for AWS is a suite of tools to more easily find and fix the reliability risks that cause downtime on AWS. The cloud opens up a range of reliability challenges that didn’t exist before, especially for customers running distributed, mission-critical workloads. Teams experience the pain of failed migrations, frequent incidents, and reliability toil, but often struggle to modernize their approach to reliability as they modernize their infrastructure. That’s where Gremlin for AWS can help.