Hijacking Service Discovery to Simulate Dependency Degradation

Services have dependencies, and dependencies degrade: they can slow down, limit the bandwidth, or go entirely offline. Service should have mechanisms to deal with that: circuit breaking, bulkheading, and graceful degradation are some of the mechanisms developers might want to implement. But how can they confirm that these mechanisms work without waiting for an incident to happen? Simulation!

There are a few solutions for simulating dependency degradation, but a majority of them require traffic to be forwarded through a proxy. In this talk, we present a few ways to streamline this traffic forwarding, by hijacking service discovery.