Fault injection

Inject faults in a percentage of your requests to test how your app handles the errors. By using the policy, you can avoid deleting pods, delaying packets, or corrupting packets.

You can set two types of faults injection:

• Delays: Delays are timing failures, such as network latency or overloaded upstreams.
• Aborts: Aborts are crash failures, such as HTTP error codes or TCP connection failures.

For more information, see the following resources.

• Istio docs for fault injection
• Gloo Mesh API docs

Before you begin

1. Complete the multicluster getting started guide to set up the following testing environment.
   • Three clusters along with environment variables for the clusters and their Kubernetes contexts.
   • The Gloo Platform CLI, meshctl, along with other CLI tools such as kubectl and istioctl.
   • The Gloo management server in the management cluster, and the Gloo agents in the workload clusters.
   • Istio installed in the workload clusters.
   • A simple Gloo workspace setup.
2. Install Bookinfo and other sample apps.

Configure fault injection policies

You can apply a fault injection policy at the route level. For more information, see Applying policies.

Review the following sample configuration files.

apiVersion: resilience.policy.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: FaultInjectionPolicy
metadata:
  annotations:
    cluster.solo.io/cluster: ""
  name: faultinjection-basic
  namespace: bookinfo
spec:
  applyToRoutes:
  - route:
      labels:
        route: ratings
  config:
    abort:
      httpStatus: 418

apiVersion: resilience.policy.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: FaultInjectionPolicy
metadata:
  name: faultinjection-basic-delay
  namespace: bookinfo
  annotations:
    cluster.solo.io/cluster: $REMOTE_CLUSTER1
spec:
  applyToRoutes:
    - route:
        labels:
          route: ratings
  config:
    delay:
      fixedDelay: 5s

apiVersion: resilience.policy.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: FaultInjectionPolicy
metadata:
  name: faultinjection-basic-abort-and-delay
  namespace: bookinfo
  annotations:
    cluster.solo.io/cluster: $REMOTE_CLUSTER1
spec:
  applyToRoutes:
    - route:
        labels:
          route: ratings
  config:
    abort:
      httpStatus: 418
      percentage:
        value: 10
    delay:
      percentage:
        value: 40
      fixedDelay: 5s

Verify fault injection policies

1. Create the example fault injection policy for the ratings app.

   kubectl apply --context ${REMOTE_CONTEXT1} -f - << EOF
   apiVersion: resilience.policy.gloo.solo.io/v2
   kind: FaultInjectionPolicy
   metadata:
     annotations:
       cluster.solo.io/cluster: ""
     name: faultinjection-basic
     namespace: bookinfo
   spec:
     applyToRoutes:
     - route:
         labels:
           route: ratings
     config:
       abort:
         httpStatus: 418
   EOF
   

2. Create a route table for the ratings app. Because the policy applies at the route level, Gloo checks for the route in a route table resource.

   kubectl apply --context ${REMOTE_CONTEXT1} -f - << EOF
   apiVersion: networking.gloo.solo.io/v2
   kind: RouteTable
   metadata:
     name: ratings-rt
     namespace: bookinfo
   spec:
     hosts:
     - ratings
     http:
     - forwardTo:
         destinations:
         - ref:
             name: ratings
             namespace: bookinfo
       labels:
         route: ratings
     workloadSelectors:
     - {}
   EOF
   

   Review the following table to understand this configuration. For more information, see the API docs.

   Setting	Description
   hosts	The host that the route table routes traffic for. In this example, the ratings host matches the ratings service within the mesh.
   http.forwardTo.destinations	The destination to forward requests that come in along the host route. In this example, the ratings service is selected.
   http.labels	The label for the route. This label must match the label that the policy selects.
   workloadSelectors	The source workloads within the mesh that this route table routes traffic for. In the example, all workloads are selected. This way, the curl container that you create in subsequent steps can send a request along the ratings route.

3. Send a request to the ratings app from within the mesh.
   • Kubernetes 1.22 or earlier
   • Kubernetes 1.23 or later

   Create a temporary curl pod in the bookinfo namespace, so that you can test the app setup. You can also use this method in Kubernetes 1.23 or later, but an ephemeral container might be simpler, as shown in the other tab.

   1. Create the curl pod.

      kubectl run -it -n bookinfo --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 curl \
        --image=curlimages/curl:7.73.0 --rm  -- sh
      

   2. Send a request to the ratings app.

      curl http://ratings:9080/ratings/1 -v
      

      Example output:

      HTTP/1.1 418 Unknown
      ...
      * Connection #0 to host ratings left intact
      fault filter abort
      

   3. Exit the temporary pod. The pod deletes itself.

      exit
      

   Use the kubernetes debug command to create an ephemeral curl container in the deployment. This way, the curl container inherits any permissions from the app that you want to test. If you don't run Kubernetes 1.23 or later, you can deploy a separate curl pod or manually add the curl container as shown in the other tab.

   kubectl --context ${REMOTE_CONTEXT1} -n bookinfo debug -i pods/$(kubectl get pod --context ${REMOTE_CONTEXT1} -l app=reviews -A -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') --image=curlimages/curl -- curl -v http://ratings:9080/ratings/1
   

   Example output:

   HTTP/1.1 418 Unknown
   

   If the output has an error about EphemeralContainers, see Ephemeral containers don’t work when testing Bookinfo.

4. Verify that you notice the fault from the previous examples.
   • Abort: All inbound requests to the ratings service result in a 418 Unknown HTTP status code.
   • Delay: All inbound requests to the ratings service have a five second delay.
   • Both abort and delay: 10% of the calls return 418 Unknown HTTP status code responses, and 40% have a five second delay before they send a response.
5. Optional: Clean up the resources that you created.

   kubectl --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 -n bookinfo delete routetable ratings-rt
   kubectl --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 -n bookinfo delete faultinjectionpolicy faultinjection-basic