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Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages

gremlin.com

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Re: Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages

#41
post #20
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was confused when I first saw the project, cartoon logo and "Gremlin Free " name, and I'm intimately familiar with both the Apache TinkerPop Gremlin open-source project, its third-party libraries, and the extensive ASF legal process we went through registering and identifying the use of marks. Read up on your trademark, IP and copyright law. The use of similar marks is not permitted when there is potential for conf…

It doesn't sound like you were confused about whether they were the same project, it sounds like you were immediately concerned whether the other endeavor was in conflict with your trademark. That may constitute confusion but it's not the sort of confusion trademarks were designed to mitigate.

No, there are ~70 or more third-party projects building on the Apache TinkerPop Gremlin platform, and new ones are popping up all the time. My first thought was this is likely a new project site for a Gremlin client library or service provider that was still using placeholder images for branding [1].

When a new third-party project site goes online, SOP is to review the new site/code, understand what it is and how it fits into the overall ecosystem, and then put their project lead in touch with TinkerPop's resident artist and illustrator, Ketrina Yim [2], who is available to create custom artwork/logos and Gremlin character illustrations tailored around the new project's theme.

However, when I dug into this site's docs to see how it was related, I couldn't find a clear connection. And when I checked with our team, they said Apache Legal has been aware of the issue since last year.

[1] Branding https://tinkerpop.apache.org/policy.html

[2] Ketrina Yim, Illustrator https://tinkerpop.apache.org/index.html#committers

Re: Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages

#42
post #5
post #2

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!

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.

Re: Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well for example in our systems all api calls only moves from a know state to another known state and any call failure redirects the client/user to the dashboard trough an error handler so they have to reload the last good state saved on the database. not perfect, but having a server crash is not much different than having a connection reset by a wifi status change or an upload timing out due the mobile network going…

It sounds like you are saying "The in-flight requests fail" to me. I really don't like the idea of saying that it's simply okay to give random users a bad user experience like that when you are actually killing servers yourself all the time.

When you have nested service calls, a single downstream failure shouldn’t fail all the way back to the root request, in most cases.

Re: Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server crashes happen. This forces you to deal with them instead of pretending they won’t.

Well yes, but I would suggest that they are uncommon enough that a few requests failing isn't a problem when those happen. It's an entirely different story when you are killing processes constantly.

If "a few requests failing isn't a problem" is a reasonable statement in your company then this type of service isn't really aimed at you. The point is to help shake out fault tolerance issues. If you can already tolerate faults there isn't much of an issue.

Re: Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages

#48

What infrastructure size does one need to have where this technique is beneficial? Genuinely curious where the threshold is.

Multiple criteria:

1. When you go from one machine running the code to more than one 2. Any system that may experience failures and detection of such failures and recovery is desirable 3. Most distributed systems due to the failure scenarios inherent in such systems.

Re: Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages

#49
post #25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound like you were confused about whether they were the same project, it sounds like you were immediately concerned whether the other endeavor was in conflict with your trademark. That may constitute confusion but it's not the sort of confusion trademarks were designed to mitigate.

We did register the Gremlin trademark early on to be sure we had all of our bases covered: https://trademarks.justia.com/871/94/gremlin-87194877.html

So 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 know well [3].

That's some inspired work, overflowing with creative originality. And to top if off, you have animated graphs floating in the background. Yeah, no possibility for confusion there. There's a name for that you know? Google it and see if you can find the word -- its definition has to do with siphoning goodwill. Who advised you on this and agreed these were wise choices and that this would be a good way to begin?

[1] https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_log...

[2] https://tinkerpop.apache.org/

[3] https://www.gremlin.com/team/

Re: Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages

#50
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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