Thursday, December 14, 2017

Gremlin raises $7.5m for "Chaos Engineering" test tool

Gremlin, a start-up based in San Jose, California, announced $7.5 million in series A funding for its tool for deliberately injecting failure into software systems in order to proactively identify and fix unknown faults.


Gremlin, which was founded by a former engineer at Amazon and Netflix, said it helps customers build more resilient system through a new engineering philosophy called chaos engineering. The new tool simulates how a system would react when encountering challenges, such as network latency, data center outages, etc. With nearly a dozen attacks and more launching soon, Gremlin recreates the most common failures across three categories: Resource, Network, and State. The Gremlin tool is delivered as a subscription-based service, with pricing based on per instance or service.

The Series A funding came from Index Ventures and Amplify Partners.

“Having been an engineer at Amazon and Netflix for the past decade and on the front lines of system outages, this was a tool I built out of necessity. I was tired of the burnout from being paged at all hours of the night - there had to be a better way,” said Kolton Andrus, CEO of Gremlin. “Chaos engineering is a new principle that is just starting to take hold, and I believe it is one of the most effective ways to make the internet more reliable. We have to empower engineers to safely experiment to build knowledge and more resilient systems.”