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Pumba

Pumba is an Apache-2.0 chaos testing, network emulation and stress testing tool for Docker containers, able to kill, pause and stop containers and add network delays or packet loss.

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Introduction

Pumba is a chaos testing, network emulation and stress testing tool for containers. It can kill, stop, pause or remove containers and use tc network emulation to add delay, packet loss, corruption and rate limits, as well as stress container resources.

The source code is at alexei-led/pumba on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 licence, with about 3,200 stars; the most recent commit was on 9 November 2026.

Features

  1. Container chaos: Kill, stop, pause and remove.
  2. Network emulation: Delay, loss, duplication, corruption and rate.
  3. Stress: CPU and memory stress.
  4. Selection: Target containers by name or regex.
  5. Scheduling: Run at intervals.

Pros

  1. Free to use: Open source under Apache-2.0.
  2. Maintained: Commits as recent as 9 November 2026.
  3. Community: About 3,200 GitHub stars.

Cons

  1. Docker-focused: Kubernetes users may prefer Chaos Mesh.
  2. Privileges: Needs access to the Docker daemon.
pumba netem --duration 1m delay --time 3000 my-container

Resources:

Pricing

Pumba is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 licence.

  1. Docker Compose environments.
  2. Developers testing network resilience locally.
  3. Not a fit for large Kubernetes estates.

Conclusion

Pumba is a handy chaos and network-emulation tool for Docker containers.

Alternatives

Other tools on CheckOps that cover similar ground. Open a page, or compare one with Pumba side by side.