Chaos testing tool for Docker and containerd

Quick Start · User Guide · Network Chaos · Deployment · Contributing

Pumba is a chaos testing and network emulation tool for Docker and containerd containers. Inspired by Netflix Chaos Monkey, Pumba brings chaos engineering to the container level — kill, stop, pause, and remove containers, inject network delays and packet loss, or stress-test container resources.

How It Works

graph LR
    A[Pumba CLI] -->|Docker API / containerd API| B[Container Runtime]
    B -->|List & Filter| C[Target Containers]

    A -->|kill / stop / pause / rm| C

    A -->|netem / iptables| D[Helper Container / Direct Exec]
    D -->|Shares network namespace| C
    D -->|Runs tc / iptables| E[Network Chaos]

Pumba supports two container runtimes:

• Docker (default): Uses the Docker API. For network chaos, creates a helper container sharing the target's network namespace.
• containerd: Uses the containerd API directly. For network chaos, executes tc/iptables commands directly inside the target container (requires tools to be installed in the container image).

Features

Quick Start

Install

Download the latest release for your platform, or use Docker:

# Binary
curl -sL https://github.com/alexei-led/pumba/releases/latest/download/pumba_linux_amd64 -o pumba
chmod +x pumba

# Docker (recommended)
docker pull ghcr.io/alexei-led/pumba:latest

First Chaos

# Kill a random container matching "test" every 30 seconds
pumba --interval=30s --random kill "re2:^test"

# Add 3 seconds network delay to mydb for 5 minutes
pumba netem --duration 5m delay --time 3000 mydb

# Drop 10% of incoming packets to myapp for 2 minutes
pumba iptables --duration 2m loss --probability 0.1 myapp

# Stress CPU of mycontainer for 60 seconds
pumba stress --duration 60s --stressors="--cpu 4 --timeout 60s" mycontainer

Containerd Runtime

# Kill a container by ID via containerd
pumba --runtime containerd --containerd-namespace k8s.io kill <container-id>

# Add network delay via containerd (requires tc in the container image)
pumba --runtime containerd --containerd-namespace moby \
  netem --duration 5m delay --time 3000 <container-id>

Tip: For network chaos on containers without tc/iptables, use --tc-image to spawn a sidecar:

pumba --runtime containerd netem --tc-image ghcr.io/alexei-led/pumba-alpine-nettools:latest \
  --duration 5m delay --time 3000 <container-id>

Run with Docker

docker run -it --rm \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  ghcr.io/alexei-led/pumba --interval=10s --random kill "re2:^test"

Docker Images

Images are built natively for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 (no QEMU).

Documentation

Demo

Community & Support

• Issues: GitHub Issues
• Blog: Pumba - Chaos Testing for Docker

License

Apache License 2.0