Fault Injection Simulator from Amazon Web Services
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) is now generally available, enabling users to actively run tests against their applications to identify possible flaws. It is a fully managed service that makes it easier to improve an application’s performance, observability, and resiliency by enabling users to run fault injection experiments on AWS.
Fault-injection experiments are a pillar of chaos engineering. Chaos engineering is the process of stressing an application in a testing or development environment by introducing disruptive events such as a sudden spike in CPU or memory use, analyzing how the device reacts, and making improvements. Netflix was another early pioneer of chaos engineering, developing a software called Chaos Monkey to measure the platform’s resiliency.
The fault injection experiment allows teams to simulate real-world conditions in order to identify hidden bugs, tracking blind spots, and performance bottlenecks in distributed systems.
With a few clicks in the console, teams can run complex scenarios with common distributed system failures happening in parallel or building sequentially over time, enabling them to create the real world conditions necessary to find hidden weaknesses.
“You can select the target resources by type, tag, ARN, or by querying for specific attributes. You also have the ability to stop the experiment if one or more stop conditions (as defined by CloudWatch Alarms) are met. This allows you to quickly terminate the experiment if it has an unexpected impact on a crucial business or operational metric.” AWS evangelist Jeff Barr shared more details about FIS.
As a summary, you can get the following benefits by using FIS:
- Improve the efficiency, resiliency, and observability of your application.
- Check how well your program runs on AWS.
- Experiments of fault injection should be safeguarded.
- A simple and quick way to begin fault injection experiments.
- By simulating real-world failure scenarios, you will gain better perspectives.
Please check out the FIS page for more information.
