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Comment by lklig | Hacker News Reader

Hey folks, I work at Gremlin and we're super excited to announce this launch. Drop any questions, comments, or concerns, we're happy to help!

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I like the look of this and love that you have released a free version. I am a little dismayed, though, that the two options are $0 and $1000/m (paid annually) with nothing in between. The free version seems great to get started, but I'd really like a lot more of the attacks that the paid version has, but $12,000 is much, much too high a price for a startup or personal project. That's quite a jump in cost.

I can’t speak for this vendor in particular, but one common reason for pricing like this is the vendor doesn’t want to deal with smaller customers as they often have the highest support requirements.

Pretty much. An enterprise customer won't bat an eye at $12K/year, and I imagine it'd pay for itself pretty quickly.

I can definitely relate with GP, though. It feels frustrating to learn about an interesting product only to find that it's priced way outside of your budget.

At least Gremlin has a public sticker price. Sometimes enterprise services just skip that completely and require you to setup a call with someone in their sales department, which usually means the service is outside of your budget.

> which usually means the service is outside of your budget.

I wonder if this is true though.

Maybe it puts off people who otherwise might be able to have a product tailored to their budget???

Its possible. I know a guy who isn't put off buy "call us" pricing notices and he seems to get good deals, so its certainly possible. Many of us will never find out though, because "call us" means "close tab". Even if I really want their product and am willing to pay a lot for it, my time is too precious to me to waste on calls.

Sure, but then why tease us with a cut-down free tier?

Thanks for putting this out! I caught a Gremlin talk at a recent conference and was very impressed with how knowledgeable the developers were.

How does the Gremlin platform interact with one of my hosts? Do I need to install an agent or something? Does it need root access to my host, hypervisor, cloud console?

Simply 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... .

If root is not required, how does the agent issue a shutdown or restart?

Hello! 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...

I see that you are on the Rust production user page [0]. Can you talk a little bit about what Rust is used for and how the experience has been?

[0]: https://www.rust-lang.org/production/users

Hey, I'm an engineer at Gremlin! When you install Gremlin onto your linux hosts for infrastructure experiments, you're using binaries that were completely written in Rust. I would be lying if I said there wasn't a bit of a learning curve (coming from mostly working with Java). Most of that can be attributed to the memory management concepts built into Rust. At first you fight the compiler a bit (asking things like, why am I not allowed to reference this variable?!), but you soon learn to love and rely on the compiler as it builds more confidence in the runtime behavior of the product.

One game changer for Rust is the treatment of Errors as first class citizens. It's literally built into the native types that Rust wants you to work with. That's huge for our product, given it runs in an inherently error-prone environment.

Thanks for the reply. I always anticipated Rust being a good fit for a daemon like tool. Not having to install a separate runtime and have things statically linked is a nice benefit. I know it's not the only language that is capable of this but being able to leverage the other bits of Rust helps with productivity as well.

I laughed out loud at "Failure as a service". Thanks for that.

Hi, we are startup using a lot of lambda, fargate, rds and dynamodb. Will gremlin work for this? I didn't see any mention of support of fargate or lambda on your website.

We'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/

Thanks that will work nicely with our lambda functions which are in Java. How about python? We are running python django in fargate. so it is possible to bring up a new container or add gremlin in the existing container. Is this possible?

Glad 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

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