
Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages - dpritchett
https://www.gremlin.com/blog/introducing-gremlin-free/
======
ingrid
Ha, after working on building Uber’s chaos monkey (which was hard and took a
while to build) and working with Netflix’s chaos monkey — it’s super nice to
see Gremlin release this service so anyone can see the benefits of chaos
engineering. I hope they add a “random chaos” feature to keep engineers on
their feet. ;-)

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lklig
Hey folks, I work at Gremlin and we're super excited to announce this launch.
Drop any questions, comments, or concerns, we're happy to help!

~~~
dkersten
I like the look of this and love that you have released a free version. I am a
little dismayed, though, that the two options are $0 and $1000/m (paid
annually) with nothing in between. The free version seems great to get
started, but I'd really like a lot more of the attacks that the paid version
has, but $12,000 is much, much too high a price for a startup or personal
project. That's quite a jump in cost.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I can’t speak for this vendor in particular, but one common reason for pricing
like this is the vendor doesn’t want to deal with smaller customers as they
often have the highest support requirements.

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
Pretty much. An enterprise customer won't bat an eye at $12K/year, and I
imagine it'd pay for itself pretty quickly.

I can definitely relate with GP, though. It feels frustrating to learn about
an interesting product only to find that it's priced way outside of your
budget.

At least Gremlin has a public sticker price. Sometimes enterprise services
just skip that completely and require you to setup a call with someone in
their sales department, which usually means the service is outside of your
budget.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> which usually means the service is outside of your budget.

I wonder if this is true though.

Maybe it puts off people who otherwise might be able to have a product
tailored to their budget???

~~~
dkersten
Its possible. I know a guy who isn't put off buy "call us" pricing notices and
he seems to get good deals, so its certainly possible. Many of us will never
find out though, because "call us" means "close tab". Even if I really want
their product and am willing to pay a lot for it, my time is too precious to
me to waste on calls.

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goldenkey
Failure as a service doesn't make all that much sense considering that a many
failure scenarios would make the target host inaccessible to Gremlin.

How does Gremlin handle this?

~~~
lklig
Good question! All of the network attacks have a whitelisting capability, to
keep the host accessible. This isn't an issue with state attacks, as the
client will come back online once the host reboots. And with resource attacks
the client typically remains active, if your application is handling starved
resources well.

------
djb_hackernews
Is anyone aware of a chaos tool that isn't a SaaS (free or not) and doesn't
require using Spinnaker like the current Netflix chaos tool does?

~~~
lklig
Yes, we compiled a list of all the OSS alternatives to Chaos Monkey here!

[https://www.gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/chaos-monkey-
alternativ...](https://www.gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/chaos-monkey-
alternatives/)

------
Negitivefrags
So here is what I don't get about this stuff.

What happens to the in-flight requests? Don't a few users run into random
errors whenever a host is killed unexpectedly?

You could have your loadbalancer retry everything that fails, but then
wouldn't every single request in your app have to be idempotent?

~~~
perfmode
Server crashes happen. This forces you to deal with them instead of pretending
they won’t.

~~~
Negitivefrags
Well yes, but I would suggest that they are uncommon enough that a few
requests failing isn't a problem when those happen.

It's an entirely different story when you are killing processes constantly.

~~~
tylersmith
If "a few requests failing isn't a problem" is a reasonable statement in your
company then this type of service isn't really aimed at you. The point is to
help shake out fault tolerance issues. If you can already tolerate faults
there isn't much of an issue.

------
isuckatcoding
How do you prevent abuse of this tool?

~~~
lklig
Security is extremely important to us. Clients authenticate to our control
plane either with a secret string or a certificate. Clients can be revoked at
any point from our webapp and as well if the client loses communication to our
control plane, any ongoing attack is halted.

Check out our security page for more:
[https://gremlin.com/security](https://gremlin.com/security)

------
debaserab2
What infrastructure size does one need to have where this technique is
beneficial? Genuinely curious where the threshold is.

~~~
farazbabar
Multiple criteria:

1\. When you go from one machine running the code to more than one 2\. Any
system that may experience failures and detection of such failures and
recovery is desirable 3\. Most distributed systems due to the failure
scenarios inherent in such systems.

------
espeed
NB: This company "Gremlin, Inc", its product "Gremlin Free", and its use of
the Gremlin name is in no way affiliated with or related to Apache TinkerPop™
Gremlin, its ASF marks, name, the open-source Gremlin graph programming
language, ASF TinkerPop Gremlin Graph Traversal Machine (GSM), associated
libraries, or the Gremlin Graph developers group formed in 2009.

[http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/faq/](http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/faq/)

~~~
yodon
It's also probably not related to the 1984 movie "Gremlins" or the 1970's car
of the same name (listed as one of the ugliest cars of all time[0])

[0] [https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/worlds-15-ugliest-
cars/7/](https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/worlds-15-ugliest-cars/7/)

~~~
espeed
ASF marks were filed at formation. Identifying and distinguishing the use of
similar and potentially confusing marks (esp in software products) is one of
the required duties. The use of ASF marks in software products is prohibited
to prevent confusion.

~~~
yodon
TinkerPop is a graph database. This is an infrastructure testing system. The
likelihood of confusion between those two use cases is comparable to the
likelihood of confusion with a movie or a car. You have a trademark, that's
awesome. Even McDonalds trademark, which is one of the broadest, is scoped.

~~~
espeed
I was confused when I first saw the project, cartoon logo and "Gremlin _Free_
" name, and I'm intimately familiar with both the Apache TinkerPop Gremlin
_open-source_ project, its third-party libraries, and the extensive ASF legal
process we went through registering and identifying the use of marks.

Read up on your trademark, IP and copyright law. The use of similar marks is
not permitted when there is potential for confusion, such as two different
software projects, esp with overlapping audiences.

NB: TinkerPop is NOT a "graph database", it is a collection of software
libraries for connecting to, using, and managing graph databases and
distributed processing platforms. Gremlin is a primary part of that stack --
Gremlin proper is the programming language, and the Gremlin GTM is the
runtime.

~~~
yodon
It doesn't sound like you were confused about whether they were the same
project, it sounds like you were immediately concerned whether the other
endeavor was in conflict with your trademark. That may constitute confusion
but it's not the sort of confusion trademarks were designed to mitigate.

~~~
lklig
We did register the Gremlin trademark early on to be sure we had all of our
bases covered:

[https://trademarks.justia.com/871/94/gremlin-87194877.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/871/94/gremlin-87194877.html)

~~~
espeed
So you begin by imitating Google's old logofont, and then you switch to
something resembling Google's new logofont [1].

And for a company name, you decide to use the name of an established
programming language and registered mark of a top-level Apache project [2],
which has been in use since its inception over a decade ago, and incidentally
it's a project and programming language that both your previous employers know
well [3].

That's some inspired work, overflowing with creative originality. And to top
if off, you have animated graphs floating in the background. Yeah, no
possibility for confusion there. There's a name for that you know? Google it
and see if you can find the word -- its definition has to do with siphoning
goodwill. Who advised you on this and agreed these were wise choices and that
this would be a good way to begin?

[1]
[https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_log...](https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo_for_google_done_in_house.php)

[2] [https://tinkerpop.apache.org/](https://tinkerpop.apache.org/)

[3] [https://www.gremlin.com/team/](https://www.gremlin.com/team/)

