Gremlin announced the release of Application Level Fault Injection (ALFI) earlier this week, introducing application-level failure injection and support for serverless environments to their Failure-as-a-Service platform offerings, alongside their successful Series B funding of $18 million led by Redpoint Ventures.
Gremlin was launched a year ago by former Amazon and Netflix developers and was designed to safely run chaos engineering experiments across hybrid infrastructures. The Principles of Chaos Engineering website describes the practice as “the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.” With the release of ALFI, that coverage now provides “full-stack resiliency,” Kolton Andrus, CEO and co-founder of Gremlin, explained in a blog post.
“The concept of purposefully injecting harm into systems is still new for many companies, but chaos engineering has been practiced at places like Amazon and Netflix for over a decade,” Andrus said in the release announcement. “We like to use the analogy of a flu shot, injecting small amounts of harm to build an immunity, in order to proactively avoid disasters. Now with ALFI, users will be able to bring this practice to serverless environments, and have much greater control within their applications.”
Andrus writes that ALFI’s precision will allow DevOps teams to “create chaos experiments with a very small blast radius in order to quickly test hypotheses and gain confidence in your architecture” with accurate simulations of real-world scenarios. “ALFI simulates delay and/or full-fledged failure of specific services, specific RPC calls, and external dependencies,” Andrus wrote. “This lets you confidently reproduce outages, proactively find latent failure modes before they bite you, and prepare for more complicated scenarios where multiple components fail.”
