Introducing Gloo Shot: Service Mesh Enabled Chaos Engineering

By Mitch Kelley and Scott Weiss

Today Gloo Shot joins the Gloo Platform family as the latest product in the modern application health toolkit. Gloo Shot enables controlled chaos engineering experiments so organizations can improve resilience and proactively prevent issues with their applications. Gloo Shot open source is available for download today, with an enterprise version coming soon

The trend to microservices in recent years has been great for speed in innovation and delivery but many of the application tools available today were designed for static application environments and haven’t caught up. Combined with constant changes, distributed microservices introduce new challenges: failure modes are harder to anticipate and resolve.

Gloo Shot is uniquely architected to:

• Integrate to service mesh
• Language agnostic
• Not require code changes
• Not require imported libraries

Extending Service Mesh for Chaos Engineering

At Solo.io, we believe that when you abstract the application away from the application network, you have the opportunity to do more interesting things with the environment. Service mesh uses sidecars in the architecture. A side car is associated with each service and component of the application so all inbound and outbound requests must travel through it. By building on top of service mesh, Gloo Shot enables controlled chaos experiments through the mesh. This means there are no dependencies on the language, code changes needed or libraries that need to be important before running these experiments. Additionally you don’t have to worry about version compatibility support between the tool and the code.

Make Things Stronger by Breaking Them

We look at Gloo Shot as a way to train your system to be more resilient and immune to issues and weaknesses by proactively creating problems in a controlled way and watching how it behaves. You can inject a failure response or latency to see how the other services respond or where bottlenecks may be and then fix them before they create an outage or problem for your customers.

See Gloo Shot in action at these upcoming talks and check out the resources below to learn more.

Check out the resources below to learn more:

• Install Gloo Shot from the Service Mesh Hub
• Join the community to get help and ask questions
• Submit any issues or requests
• Contact Us if you are interested in the Enterprise version