Blackhole Attack Use Cases

Technical Use Cases

Test Dependency Failures

Testing resilience to failed dependencies is crucial for modern applications. Since dependencies are outside of the control of engineering teams, applications must be designed to tolerate and work around dependency failures. Teams can use Blackhole attacks to validate that if a dependency fails, the application degrades successfully instead of crashing. This also lets you test error-handling mechanisms such as failover, error messages, and retries.

Blackhole attacks can also help determine whether a dependency is critical or non-critical. Critical dependencies are essential for an application to operate, such as databases, network storage services, and payment processing services. It’s not always clear whether or not a dependency is critical, but by using a Blackhole attack, teams can quickly test each dependency to determine its criticality.

Validate Cluster Resiliency

Although clustered workloads are generally resilient to network outages, major disruptions can put cluster stability at risk. For example, if two nodes in a three-node cluster become disconnected, it could result in a split brain scenario. When the nodes come back online, they’ll each have a different and inconsistent view of the cluster.

High Availability (HA) clusters can reduce the impact of outages by monitoring node state, providing redundancy, and handling failover. Blackhole attacks can validate that your HA cluster is able to gracefully handle unresponsive nodes, recover from failures, load balance traffic to healthier nodes, and avoid split brains.

Validate Monitoring and Alerting

Being able to detect unresponsive, disconnected, or failed nodes is critical to reliability. Your monitoring tools should be configured to detect nodes that are experiencing network outages and start an automatic remediation process or notify an engineer. With a Blackhole attack, you can test that your monitoring and alerting tools are configured to correctly notify your teams quickly.

Business Initiatives Aligned with Blackhole Attacks

Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery Planning

Blackhole attacks are commonly used to simulate a sudden loss of a system or service. If these systems are critical to your business, it’s important to have a plan to restore service as quickly as possible. Blackhole attacks offer a safe and controlled way of simulating system-wide outages, allowing teams to practice their incident response and recovery plans without the added stress of a real-world disaster.

Streamline a Cloud Migration

In the cloud, your availability is only as high as the availability of your cloud provider. If a network outage brings part of your cloud provider offline, it can impact your own systems. Using blackhole attacks lets you prepare for these scenarios in advance so that you can make your services more resilient and avoid unexpected downtime.