Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a new fault simulator to its Fault Injection Service (FIS) to help customers see how resilient their businesses are to major outages.
The announcement, made during the company's AWS re:Invent event, allows customers to “put chaos engineering into practice at scale” by introducing simulation for complete outage of the AWS Availability Zone or loss of connectivity to another AWS region .
Amazon says engineers can do this to better understand their direct and indirect dependencies and to test recovery time after an outage.
AWS outage simulator goes to the next level
While cloud services have proven to be reliable overall, rising geopolitical tensions have led companies to worry about potential outages and the impact they could have on their business. Not to mention some pretty embarrassing blunders that have happened recently, including a simple typo that caused an hours-long Azure outage in Brazil.
One of the new additions to FIS is “AZ Availability: Power Interruption.” Amazon says this will pull the plug on a targeted set of resources in an availability zone, including 'EC2 instances (including those in EKS and ECS clusters), EBS volumes, Auto Scaling Groups, VPC subnets, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis clusters and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) clusters.”
Another test, 'Cross-Region: Connectivity', will prevent applications from accessing resources in another target region, including traffic from 'EC2 instances, ECS jobs, EKS pods, Lambda functions associated with a VPC… traffic flowing over Transit Gateways and VPC peering connections, as well as cross-region S3 and DynamoDB replication.”
Amazon has confirmed that these tests will be available in all commercial AWS regions where FIS is already available, and will cost the action minutes consumed by the experiments being run.