Top all-time · #3334
Gremlin Blog
Company blog · gremlin.com/blog · on HN as tammybutowsystemsprogramming
Gremlin Blog is the company blog at gremlin.com, writing about systems and programming. Since 2018, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “Is your microservice a distributed monolith?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Blog of Gremlin, a chaos engineering vendor. HN commenters link its posts on distributed monoliths, incident severity levels, the Chaos Monkey guide, and SRE. None of the comments judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Reduce downtime, improve resilience, and protect revenue. Gremlin helps teams see where systems will fail, fix them first, and prove the results.
Most-linked posts?
- Is your microservice a distributed monolith?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-10-05
- How to Establish a High Severity Incident Management Program3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-01-19
- Chaos Monkey Guide for Engineers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-10-18
- The State of Chaos Engineering in 20212 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-26
- Open Source Chaos Monkey Alternatives2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-18
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-23
- Chaos Engineering: the history, principles, and practice2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-02-27
- How to establish a high-severity incident management program2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-06
What Hacker News says?
In this context, it refers to an incident. Incidents are often referred to by their severity, such as SEV1, SEV2, etc. E.g. https://www.gremlin.com/community/tutorials/how-to-establish... https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management/kpis/severity-... https://response.pagerduty.com/before/severity_levels/
Comment linking /community/tutorials/how-to-establish-a-high-severity-incident-management-program/
on “Asking nicely for root command execution and getting it”Submitted Chaos Monkey Guide for Engineers as a story · 195 points
HN discussionI didn't realize the UI I designed for Gremlin was a TODO app. https://www.gremlin.com/ I made it in 2017 and it's still in use today.
Comment linking /
on “I fell in love with low-JS”Submitted Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages as a story · 164 points
HN discussionSo you begin by imitating Google's old logofont, and then you switch to something resembling Google's new logofont [1]. And for a company name, you decide to use the name of an established programming language and registered mark of a top-level Apache project [2], which has been in use since its inception over a decade ago, and incidentally it's a project and programming language that both your previous employers kn…
Comment linking /team/
on “Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages”Submitted Gremlin Introduces Chaos Engineering Scenarios to Prepare for Real-World Outages as a story · 28 points
HN discussionSecurity is extremely important to us. Clients authenticate to our control plane either with a secret string or a certificate. Clients can be revoked at any point from our webapp and as well if the client loses communication to our control plane, any ongoing attack is halted. Check out our security page for more: https://gremlin.com/security
Comment linking /security
on “Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages”Submitted Chaos monkey guide for engineers as a story · 7 points
HN discussionHello! I am a Solutions Architect for Gremlin. Great question! It uses four Linux Capabilities to accomplish that listed here: https://www.gremlin.com/docs/security/overview/#linux-capabi...
Comment linking /docs/security/overview/
on “Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages”Submitted The State of Chaos Engineering in 2021 as a story · 5 points
HN discussionGlad to hear it! Additional language support is top of mind. Node is up next and python is high on the list. Regarding your app running in Fargate, you can do either. Hop over to our #support slack channel and we can help out more! https://www.gremlin.com/slack
Comment linking /slack
on “Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages”Submitted Simple Kubernetes targeting for chaos experiments as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYes, we compiled a list of all the OSS alternatives to Chaos Monkey here! https://www.gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/chaos-monkey-alternativ...
Comment linking /chaos-monkey/chaos-monkey-alternatives/
on “Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages”Submitted Chaos Engineering: the history, principles, and practice as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWe've got you covered! Gremlin supports severless products with application layer fault injection. Take a look at our docs for more: https://www.gremlin.com/docs/application-layer/overview/
Comment linking /docs/application-layer/overview/
on “Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages”Submitted Open Source Chaos Monkey Alternatives as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSimply install an agent, authenticate with our control plane, and create attacks through our webapp. No root access required. Check out more info at https://www.gremlin.com/docs/infrastructure-layer/installati... .
Comment linking /docs/infrastructure-layer/installation/
on “Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages”Submitted The Next Step: Application-Level Fault Injection as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOther useful materials: - Chaos Monkey Guide for Engineers https://www.gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/ - Recent HN discussion on Resilience Engineering: Where do I start? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19898645
Comment linking /chaos-monkey/
on “Principles of Chaos Engineering (2018)”Submitted State of Chaos Engineering 2021 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis anti-pattern is called a “distributed monolith”: https://www.gremlin.com/blog/is-your-microservice-a-distribu...
Comment linking /blog/is-your-microservice-a-distributed-monolith/
on “How big should a microservice be? (2013)”Submitted How to Create Chaos Engineering Dashboards with Datadog and Gremlin as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf I understand correctly, one of the limitations of doing application level failure injection with Gremlin is that you need to integrate it into your code: https://www.gremlin.com/docs/application-layer/installation/ It might be interesting to combine these approaches and use a traffic split to send a percentage of traffic to Gremlin instead of integrating into the code directly.
Comment linking /docs/application-layer/installation/
on “Failure Injection on Kubernetes with SMI and Linkerd”Submitted Gremlin Announces Spinnaker Integration for “Continuous Chaos” as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou mean like https://www.gremlin.com/ ? One of the founders of Gremlin is an Engineer that worked in Netflix and probably worked on Chaos Monkey as well :)
Comment linking /
on “Failure Injection on Kubernetes with SMI and Linkerd”Submitted The State of Chaos Engineering in 2021 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAll sysadmins have transitioned to Devops/SRE roles, given your background, you will be able to pick that up pretty easily. Everything that you previously did on-prem has transitioned to the cloud. The fundamentals remain the same - only the tooling has changed. https://www.gremlin.com/site-reliability-engineering/how-to-...
Comment linking /site-reliability-engineering/how-to-become-a-top-notch-sre/
on “How to specialize after a career as a generalist?”Submitted State of Chaos Engineering 2021 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How much money do SREs make? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Chaos Engineering Is Not Just Tools – It's Culture as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
