Resilience Testing Distributed Systems with Fuzzy Monkey Testing

Fuzzy Monkey testing distributed systems - Red Colobus from Wikipedia

One of the keys to good software is good testing. There are well-known testing suites for back end code – things like junit and py.test. There are also good front-end testing tools – things like Selenium. But for testing distributed systems there aren’t so many well-known tools – because the problem is quite different, and harder. In this blog post we’ll cover the “Fuzzy Monkey” methodology used for testing three different successful distributed systems (including the Assimilation Suite) – its history and how and why it works.

Assimilation Release 1.1.3 (“Leap Day”) is now out!

New Assimilation Release 1.1.3

We just put out a new Assimilation release with a few bug fixes, and a few new features. The new features center around visualization, security, with even more emphasis on helping you “eat the elephant” of getting you into a better security posture. In this post, we’ll explain more in detail what these features are and how they will help you improve and maintain your security posture.

Announcing the IT Best Practices Community

Cybersecurity best practices community

Computer security is problematic today, is expected to get worse for years to come. The security field is widely acknowledged to be suffering from a shortage of qualified security experts. Many people believe that significant improvements in automation are the only way to address this growing problem. Compared to the level of automation that system management has experienced in recent years, security has been estimated to be at least a decade behind.

Our IT Best Practices community was created to help support security automation efforts. We aim to collect, categorize and curate mechanically-verifiable best practices for servers, services and networking, in support of the idea of “best practices as code”.