AWS Fault Injection Simulator announces Pause I/O action for Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes

Posted On: Jan 27, 2023

AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) now supports Pause I/O for Amazon EBS volumes as a new FIS action type. With the new fault action, customers with highly available applications can test their architecture and monitoring, such as operating system timeout configurations and CloudWatch alarms, to improve resiliency to storage faults. Customers can observe how their application stack responds, and tune their monitoring and recovery process to improve resiliency and application availability.

EBS volumes are designed to meet the needs of highly available applications, such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft products. The Pause I/O action reproduces the real-world signals that happen when a volume is not responding to I/O operations. This includes signals such as Amazon CloudWatch metrics, changes to EBS volume status, and operating system timeouts. This lets customers test and build confidence that their entire application stack responds as intended to an unresponsive EBS volume. Customers can use the quick action from the EBS console or create an experiment template in the AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) console to integrate the experiment with continuous integration and release testing and to combine multiple FIS actions in one experiment.

The Pause I/O action is generally available in Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Europe (Paris), US East (Ohio), Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (London), Europe (Milan), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Canada (Central).

To learn more, visit the EBS FIS actions user guide.