Toxiproxy

ELI5 — The Vibe Check

Toxiproxy sits between your app and its dependencies and makes the connection terrible on purpose. Add 500ms latency? Done. Drop 50% of packets? Sure. It's like putting your app through a bad WiFi simulation so you can see how it behaves when the network isn't perfect. Because in production, it never is.

Real Talk

A TCP proxy developed by Shopify for simulating network conditions in test environments. It introduces configurable toxics (latency, bandwidth limits, slow close, timeout) between services to test application behavior under degraded network conditions, integrating with test suites via client libraries.

When You'll Hear This

"Toxiproxy adds 2 seconds of latency to our DB connection in integration tests to verify timeout handling." / "We use Toxiproxy in CI to ensure our retry logic works when the payment API is slow."