AWS Fault Injection Simulator Improves Cloud Chaos Engineering

Dec. 29, 2020, 1:27 a.m.

TL;DR

At AWS re-Invent 2020, Amazon unveiled its upcoming new Chaos Engineering tool, the AWS Fault Injection Simulator. It is a fully-managed chaos engineering service that allows you to discover potential issues before they happen. With chaos engineering, you can create real-world conditions to uncover hidden issues and monitor blind spots and performance bottlenecks that are, otherwise, difficult to find in distributed systems.

The AWS FIS can also be integrated into your CD pipeline to help you repeatedly test the impact of fault actions as part of your software delivery process

Key Facts

1
The AWS Fault Injection Simulator is all set to become available in 2021 and will help developers and SREs discover weaknesses in their apps even before they become an issue.
2
The AWS Fault Injection Simulator will help developers understand how their app responds by injecting failures, such as database error or server latency, into applications.
3
FIS can run controlled Chaos Engineering experiments on a variety of AWS services. You can use it alongside other services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud 2 (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and others.
4
With FIS, you can run safe experiments. FIS will tell you if your hypothesis is confirmed once your experiment is over. You can then use the data collected by CloudWatch to figure out where you need to make improvements.

Details

The AWS Fault Injection Simulator features include a simplified setup and fine-grained safety controls. You can run real-world scenarios as the FIS supports gradually and simultaneously impairing the performance of different types of resources, APIs, services, and geographic locations. You can also randomize the resources or create customized fault-types to increase the layer of complexity.

The AWS FIS also grants visibility throughout the entire run of the experiment. You can observe what actions have been executed while your experiment is running. It can also be used with the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and AWS SDKs.

Amazon has not yet released the pricing information for the AWS Fault Injection Simulator.

You can also use the AWS FIS to run a game day by creating event conditions and monitoring the performance of your system. A game day is a process of rehearsing ahead of an event by creating anticipated events and observing how the team and system respond.

The AWS FIS can also be integrated into your CD pipeline to help you repeatedly test the impact of fault actions as part of your software delivery process.

With the introduction of the new service, AWS will simplify the process of running chaos experiments in the cloud. Built to be easily set up and integrated, FIS is designed to run controlled chaos engineering experiments across a wide range of AWS services.
Werner Vogels
CTO, Amazon