Chaos testing tool for Docker
Quick Start · User Guide · Network Chaos · Deployment · Contributing
Pumba is a chaos testing and network emulation tool for Docker 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.
graph LR
A[Pumba CLI] -->|Docker API| B[Docker Engine]
B -->|List & Filter| C[Target Containers]
A -->|kill / stop / pause / rm| C
A -->|netem / iptables| D[Helper Container]
D -->|Shares network namespace| C
D -->|Runs tc / iptables| E[Network Chaos]
For container chaos (kill, stop, pause, rm), Pumba talks directly to Docker.
For network chaos (netem, iptables), Pumba creates a helper container that shares the target's network namespace and injects tc or iptables rules.
| Category | Commands | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Container Chaos | kill, stop, pause, rm, restart |
Disrupt container lifecycle |
| Execute | exec |
Run commands inside containers |
| Network Delay | netem delay |
Add latency to egress traffic |
| Packet Loss | netem loss, iptables loss |
Drop packets (egress and ingress) |
| Network Effects | netem duplicate, corrupt, rate |
Duplicate, corrupt, or rate-limit packets |
| Stress Testing | stress |
CPU, memory, I/O stress via stress-ng (child cgroup or same-cgroup injection) |
| Targeting | names, regex (re2:), labels, --random |
Flexible container selection |
| Scheduling | --interval |
Recurring chaos at fixed intervals |
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# 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" mycontainerdocker run -it --rm \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
ghcr.io/alexei-led/pumba --interval=10s --random kill "re2:^test"| Registry | Image | Status |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Container Registry | ghcr.io/alexei-led/pumba |
✅ Primary |
| Docker Hub | alexeiled/pumba |
Images are built natively for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 (no QEMU).
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| User Guide | Container chaos commands, targeting, scheduling, configuration |
| Network Chaos | netem, iptables, advanced scenarios, architecture diagrams |
| Stress Testing | CPU/memory/IO stress testing with stress-ng |
| Deployment | Docker, Kubernetes DaemonSets, OpenShift |
| Contributing | Build from source, run tests, project structure |
- Issues: GitHub Issues
- Blog: Pumba - Chaos Testing for Docker