What is Gremlin?

Gremlin is a platform service that aims to provide chaos engineering experimentsChaos engineering is an approach to investigate how complex systems perform under stress and to spot failures before they occur.

Gremlin provides a framework for attacks. Attacks are then fed into the system assembled as different plots/schemes/scenarios. These schemes can be further used to record the outcome or the damage of these assembled attacks.

Gremlin’s user interface or APIs allow several testing mechanisms of Kubernetes objects.

Previously, testing was done at the container level. However, recent updates to Gremlin have made sure that chaos testing is also specified at the service level.

Gremlin has a specialized mechanism for conducting Kubernetes testing.

The process identifies the primitives, such as nodes and pods, and targets them. Users then have the option to select what kind of disruption they want to cause and what service traffic they want to cause it to do.

Kubernetes testing

Users require the helm chart to enable Kubernetes testing. The Gremlin is upgraded using this helm chart.

Next, the user interface is used to create the attacks to be targeted. Users then define a test experiment to conduct. Then, Gremlin targets the underlying containers.

After the test is completed, all the targeted containers in the test become part of the test results report – their respective Kubernetes object group these containers.