Resorting to chaos may not sound like a sound engineering method, but chaos engineering is quickly becoming a standard way to test complex systems before real-world outages put those systems to a test. Netflix’s engineering team launched Chaos Monkey back in 2012 and that remains one of the most-used tools for this, but Microsoft Azure […]
According to AWS, its new Fault Injection Simulator makes it easy for teams to monitor and inspect blind spots, performance bottlenecks, and other unknown vulnerabilities unidentified by conventional tests.
The tool comes with pre-built experiment templates that enable teams to gradually or simultaneously impair distinct applications’ performance in a production environment. For convenience, the simulator also provides controls and guardrails so teams can automatically roll back or stop the experiment when specific conditions are met.
What’s more, the simulator allows teams to create disruptive experiments across a range of AWS services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and Amazon RDS. Teams can also run “GameDay scenarios or stress-test their most critical applications on AWS at scale,” said AWS.
Complete with nervous warnings: how much chaos is too much?
Tim Anderson Tue 16 Mar 2021 // 17:15 UTC Share
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AWS has rolled out its Fault Injection Simulator (FIS), designed to introduce deliberate faults into its cloud services so that users can test the resilience of their applications.
Chaos engineering is useful for discovering what actually happens in the event of a failure, observing the principle that administrators cannot know whether something like a failover system will work as expected until there is an actual outage.
It can also be used to test the impact of things like services that are slow to respond, or which encounter bad data, or which run out of memory. The idea is not only to avoid catastrophe but also to measure the outcome and its potential impact on a business.
Plus: Managed Grafana service for observability
Tim Anderson Wed 16 Dec 2020 // 16:28 UTC Share
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re:Invent Amazon Web Services CTO Dr Werner Vogels has opened up on CloudShell, a Linux environment accessed through the browser which gives users a command-line and scripting environment for all AWS services.
At a re:Invent keynote yesterday, the exec also described Fault Injection Simulator - chaos engineering as a service, intended to help customers build resilient applications.
Dr Werner Vogels expounding the benefits of observability at an ancient food processing factory near his home town of Amsterdam, NL
Vogels’ keynote was a welcome relief from the relentless marketing that has characterised many other re:Invent keynotes, focusing mainly on technology and software engineering. Speaking from a 19th century sugar beet processing plant in Haarlem in the Netherlands, he used the industrial background to discuss matters such as operations, observab
AWS Introducing Fault Injection Simulator
December 15, 2020
AWS has announced it is introducing the Fault Injection Simulator, a fully managed chaos engineering service, in 2021.
Chaos engineering involves testing a system in disruptive and random ways, in an effort to mimic the circumstances and conditions experienced in real life. As cloud computing has risen in prominence, and become the backbone allowing companies to remain productive during the pandemic, stress testing systems is more important than ever.
AWS’ chaos engineering service will provide a companies with a new way to test and improve their systems.
“Fault Injection Simulator simplifies the process of setting up and running controlled chaos engineering experiments across a range of AWS services so teams can build confidence in their application behavior,” writes AWS. “With Fault Injection Simulator, teams can quickly set up experiments using pre-built templates that generate the desired disruptions, suc