Gremlin — the world’s first Failure-as-a-Service platform — has announced that it has raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Redpoint Ventures. Gremlin has also launched an Application Level Fault Injection (ALFI), which enables development operations teams to safely inject failure at the application level for developing full-stack resiliency even within serverless environments.
“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 Gremlin co-founder and CEO Kolton Andrus. “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.”
Using ALFI, companies are able to run chaos experiments on serverless environments that do not have a specified host or container. By being able to verify that serverless environments can handle failures, it will increase the confidence and willingness of companies to run real production workloads. And it turns failure into resilience by offering engineers with a fully hosted solution to safely experiment on complex systems in order to find weaknesses before customers are impacted and revenue is lost.
“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,” added Gremlin co-founder and CTO Matthew Fornaciari. “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.”
Some of Gremlin’s customers include Expedia, Qualtrics, Twilio, Under Armour, and Walmart. Gremlin has raised $23.75 million in total funding so far.
