Yes, this is a real thing! You can download it here: https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast
Just stumbled across this and wanted to share it here. Unsure if anyone will really get some use out of it, but may be fun to play with regardless!Testing distributed systems under hard failures like network partitions and instance termination is critical, but it's also important we test them under less catastrophic conditions because this is what they most often experience. Comcast is a tool designed to simulate common network problems like latency, bandwidth restrictions, and dropped/reordered/corrupted packets.
It works by wrapping up some system tools in a portable(ish) way. On BSD-derived systems such as OSX, we use tools like ipfw and pfctl to inject failure. On Linux, we use iptables and tc. Comcast is merely a thin wrapper around these controls.