Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The worst thing you could do after successfully deploying to a new environment is to accidentally delete critical infrastructure. Unfortunately, that happened to one Google Cloud customer when their private cloud subscription was accidentally deleted, resulting in nearly two weeks of downtime. This isn’t an isolated problem either: Microsoft Azure had a similar problem when a typo inadvertently deleted an entire SQL Server instance rather than a specific database.

There’s a reason why observability and incident response practices have become standard across modern software development. Anyone wanting to minimize downtime and deliver reliable, available applications needs to have fully instrumented systems and playbooks so they can respond quickly and effectively to outages or incidents. But there’s another piece to the reliability puzzle: resilience testing.

Today, Gremlin is introducing Gremlin for AWS, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When discussing reliability, we tend to focus on the things that we have control over: applications, virtual machine instances, deployment patterns, etc. But this ignores a significant and ever-growing part of nearly all modern software: dependencies. Dependencies are services that provide extra functionality for other services and applications. For instance, many websites depend on databases, caches, payment processors, and similar services in order to function.