Gremlin raises $18 million, announces Application Level Fault Injection
Gremlin announced an $18 million Series B led by Redpoint Ventures. Along with the new funding round, Gremlin has launched Application Level Fault Injection (ALFI), enabling DevOps teams to inject failure at the application level for developing full-stack resiliency, including within serverless environments.
“Gremlin is the leader in helping businesses avoid disaster by proactively testing their systems,” said Tomasz Tunguz, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures.
“In a world where nearly every business is an online business, Gremlin makes companies more resilient and saves millions of dollars in unnecessary disasters and outages. We’re thrilled to join them on this journey.”
“The concept of purposefully injecting harm into systems is still new for many companies, but chaos engineering has been practiced at places like Amazon and Netflix for over a decade,” said Kolton Andrus, CEO and Co-Founder of Gremlin.
“We like to use the analogy of a flu shot, injecting small amounts of harm to build an immunity, in order to proactively avoid disasters. Now with ALFI, users will be able to bring this practice to serverless environments, and have much greater control within their applications.”
According to Cloudability’s State of the Cloud 2018 report, serverless adoption has been growing steadily and will only continue to increase.
With the general availability of ALFI, companies can be more targeted about testing their products and services, including the ability to run chaos experiments on serverless environments that do not have a specified host or container.
Being able to verify that serverless environments can handle failures will increase confidence and willingness of companies to run production workloads.
“These practices seek to proactively find failures before they can unexpectedly occur and cause large-scale cascade failures in today’s complex IT systems,” said Mark Thomas Jaggers, Research Director of Infrastructure Strategies for IT Leadership at Gartner.
“With ALFI one of the first problems we wanted to address was improving the reliability and understanding of serverless providers like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions,” said Matthew Fornaciari, CTO and Co-Founder of Gremlin.
“It’s a tough problem to solve because the host is abstracted and it’s a very new technology — but now we can run attacks at the application level, and with a level of precision that isn’t possible at the infrastructure level. We are giving them a scalpel to very specifically target particular communications between different systems and services.”