Gremlin now uses AI to break distributed systems faster

What better way to find out what your system can take than by breaking it? Popularized by Netflix more than a decade ago, chaos testing is the practice of deliberately introducing controlled failures into working systems to test their resilience. Now, a startup that built its business around this practice is using AI to automate more of the testing and troubleshooting process. Gremlin’s Foresight AI, a new add-on to its current “chaos engineering” services, autonomously breaks software infrastructure to uncover hidden bugs before they pop up in production. Chaos engineering can be deliciously dangerous for an engineer: Turn off a random server, load balancer or even an entire region of a cloud deployment, then observe how well the rest of the system tries to keep serving customers. If it does, job well done. If it's borked, more reliability work is afoot. …