Profile
Gremlin is an enterprise-grade chaos engineering platform that enables organizations to proactively test system reliability through controlled failure injection. The platform provides comprehensive capabilities for simulating and orchestrating infrastructure failures, network conditions, and resource constraints across distributed systems. As a pioneer in commercial chaos engineering solutions, Gremlin has established itself as a leading platform used by major financial institutions and Fortune 100 companies. Its core value lies in helping organizations systematically validate system resilience before failures impact customers.
Focus
Gremlin addresses the fundamental challenge of testing complex distributed systems for resilience against unpredictable failures. The platform enables teams to proactively identify weaknesses through controlled experiments rather than discovering them during production incidents. Primary use cases include validating failover mechanisms, testing degraded service conditions, and verifying system behavior under resource constraints. Target users are Site Reliability Engineering teams, platform engineers, and DevOps professionals responsible for maintaining system availability and performance in distributed environments.
Background
Founded in 2016, Gremlin emerged from the chaos engineering practices developed at companies like Netflix and Amazon. The platform was created by Kolton Andrus and other reliability engineering veterans to commercialize and standardize chaos engineering practices. Notable adopters include major enterprises such as JPMorgan Chase, Target, and Twilio, who use Gremlin for systematic reliability testing. The platform operates under a commercial license model while maintaining some open-source components, with ongoing development focused on enterprise reliability management capabilities.
Main features
Comprehensive failure injection framework
The platform provides an extensive suite of failure modes for testing system resilience, including resource constraints (CPU, memory, disk, GPU), network conditions (latency, packet loss, DNS failures), and state modifications (process termination, time changes). The framework implements precise control over failure parameters and blast radius, enabling teams to conduct graduated testing from individual components to entire system segments. Safety mechanisms include automatic experiment halting when unexpected degradation occurs, ensuring controlled testing even in production environments.
Advanced scenario orchestration system
Gremlin's orchestration capabilities enable teams to create complex, multi-step reliability experiments that simulate real-world failure scenarios. The system supports defining custom attack sequences with configurable magnitude and scope parameters, while maintaining precise control over experiment progression. Built-in safety controls and rollback mechanisms ensure experiments remain contained, while detailed observability features track system behavior throughout the testing process. This allows organizations to validate complex failure modes and recovery procedures systematically.
Enterprise reliability management suite
The platform includes comprehensive tooling for managing reliability testing across large organizations, featuring role-based access controls, audit logging, and integration with existing security infrastructure. The suite provides standardized reliability scoring and reporting capabilities to track improvement over time, while supporting compliance requirements through detailed audit trails. Integration capabilities enable automated reliability testing within CI/CD pipelines and connection with observability platforms for automated health monitoring during experiments.
