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The CTO is responsible for reliability and availability

Who's ultimately responsible for reliability? "You need an executive champion that cares about this. And to me, it's the CTO. The CTO is responsible for the quality of the code that you're writing, the quality of the customer experience, the quality of the product. And so, you know, your software doesn't work. The quality is zero. Not half points here. If you can't use it, it doesn't work.

How Nagarro used Gremlin to prevent a cascading failure outage

Check out how Nagarro used Gremlin to help a client prevent a cascading failure before it caused an outage. "Once we had tested a critical software that was doing millions of online transactions on a daily basis. The design was fail safe, providing redundancy on critical services by having multiple instances deployed on different VMs. What we did was we ran a virtual machine terminate test to bring down an instance of that service with the hypothesis that it will recover automatically. Well, the service did recover automatically, but the system saw a cascading failure.

Strategies for migrating to Kubernetes

Migrating to a new platform can often feel like navigating a maze of technical challenges, especially when the platform is as complex as Kubernetes. Kubernetes has a vast number of features designed to help with deploying and managing large applications, but learning how to use it effectively can be just as challenging as‌ moving your workloads over. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, of course, and there are several strategies for easing this process.

Amazon makes reliability a priority-do you?

Are you making really reliability a priority? Or are you just giving it lip service? "At Amazon, I was part of the retail website. Outages were lost money, lost money was bad. So Amazon cared deeply about this. That was part of it. The other part was it was part of the engineering culture. When I arrived, one of the things I was told was, we expect you to write high quality, performant, efficient, available code. It's just everybody.

How reliability differs between monolithic and microservice-based architectures

Microservices have forever changed the way we build applications. Tools like Docker and Kubernetes made microservice-based architectures widely accessible to software developers, and cloud platforms like Amazon EKS made deploying containers fast and inexpensive. They've also enabled even small engineering teams to deploy code faster, leverage fault tolerance and redundancy, scale more efficiently, and take full ownership of their services from development all the way into production.

How to run Chaos Engineering experiments in your CI/CD pipeline

Part of the Gremlin Office Hours series: A monthly deep dive with Gremlin experts. Ad-hoc Chaos Engineering experiments are great for learning more about how your systems work, but they don’t tell you how your systems behave over time. As new features get deployed, environments change, and regressions get introduced, even the most resilient systems can gain reliability risks. QA and performance testing are already built into CI/CD - why not reliability?

How to build zone-redundant cloud instances and clusters

Redundancy is a core tenet of cloud computing. While major cloud platforms have high targets for reliability, they can still fail, and it’s important for teams to have a plan for when they do. But how can you build services that can withstand something as disruptive as a datacenter outage? In this blog, we’ll show you how to prepare for availability zone outages by proactively detecting services operating in a single zone.

Five ways Gremlin helps organizations meet DORA requirements

Enacted by the European Union, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) establishes new standards for digital operational resilience in the financial sector. DORA changes the financial sector's approach to digital security and resilience by imposing stringent Information and Communication Technology (ICT) risk management, incident reporting, third-party risk management, and regular testing.

Three roles you need for reliability success

It’s one thing to say that reliability is a priority for your organization, and a whole other thing to make actual, demonstrable improvements in the availability of your applications. Sadly, it’s common for organizations to invest time, money, and effort into improving reliability only to barely nudge the needle on incidents and downtime. But there are hundreds of companies successfully improving their reliability posture—and doing it at enterprise scale.

How to build reliable services with unreliable dependencies

In an earlier blog, we looked at slow dependencies and how they can impact the reliability of other services. While we explored what happens when dependencies are degraded, what happens when dependencies outright fail? What can you do when your application or service sends a request to another service, and nothing comes back? We’ll answer this question by using Gremlin to proactively test a service with multiple dependencies.