Originally announced June 16, 2020. Source: GlobeNewswire.
Gremlin Earns AWS DevOps Competency Designation
San Jose, June 16, 2020 — Gremlin, the Chaos Engineering company, announced that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) DevOps Competency status. The designation recognizes that Gremlin possesses deep expertise in Chaos Engineering and helps customers integrate chaos experiments directly into their DevOps workflows on AWS.
What the AWS DevOps Competency Means
The AWS Competency Program exists to help customers identify AWS Partner Network (APN) members that have demonstrated specialized technical proficiency and proven customer success in a specific domain. Achieving DevOps Competency status — with a particular focus on Monitoring, Logging, and Performance — requires an APN partner to:
- Demonstrate deep AWS technical expertise.
- Deliver solutions that integrate seamlessly on AWS infrastructure.
- Show verified, successful customer outcomes in their area of specialization.
For Gremlin, this recognition validates its platform’s ability to help engineering teams safely run chaos experiments on AWS-hosted systems — identifying weaknesses before they manifest as outages or customer-facing failures.
Why Chaos Engineering Belongs in Your DevOps Pipeline
Chaos Engineering is the practice of deliberately injecting controlled failures into a system to uncover hidden weaknesses. Rather than waiting for incidents to surface unpredictably in production, teams proactively expose and fix fragility in a safe, repeatable way. When embedded into CI/CD pipelines and DevOps workflows, chaos experiments become a standard quality gate — similar to load testing or security scanning.
As Jim Scheibmeir, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner, noted in Gremlin’s announcement:
“Many organizations approach the concept of chaos engineering with the attitude that the practice is far too risky to execute into production. The reality is that avoiding chaos engineering is equivalent to embracing crisis engineering.”
Jim Scheibmeir, Senior Principal Analyst, Gartner
This framing is particularly relevant for teams operating on AWS, where distributed architectures, microservices, and managed services introduce complex, emergent failure modes that traditional testing rarely catches.
Gremlin’s Perspective: Built on AWS by Ex-Amazonians
Gremlin’s founders bring direct experience from Amazon, which shaped both the product’s design philosophy and its deep AWS integration. Kolton Andrus, CEO and Co-Founder, commented:
“As ex-Amazonians, we have been fans of how AWS enables engineers for a long time. Building Gremlin on top of AWS was a natural choice, and many of our existing customers are also heavy AWS users. We have the experience to help other companies deal with new failure modes as they move to the cloud.”
Kolton Andrus, CEO and Co-Founder, Gremlin
This background is relevant for DevOps engineers evaluating chaos tooling: a team that has operated at Amazon-scale hyperscale understands the failure patterns unique to cloud-native infrastructure.
About Gremlin
Gremlin describes itself as the world’s first hosted Chaos Engineering service. Its platform allows engineering teams to safely run experiments on complex distributed systems — CPU exhaustion, network latency injection, instance termination, and more — in a controlled, auditable manner. The company was founded in 2016 by Kolton Andrus (CEO) and Matthew Fornaciari (CTO), and has raised funding from Amplify Partners, Index Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures.
Customers listed at the time of this announcement included Charter Communications, Expedia, Mailchimp, Qualtrics, Target, Twilio, Under Armour, and Walmart.