Amazon EC2 Testing Policy

These guidelines concern customers who are planning on running high volume network tests directly from their Amazon EC2 instances to other locations such as other Amazon EC2 instances, AWS properties/services, or external endpoints outside of the AWS network infrastructure. These tests are sometimes called stress tests, load tests, or gameday tests. For the sake of these guidelines we consider a "network stress test" to be when a test sends a large volume of legitimate or test traffic to a specific intended target application. The endpoint and infrastructure are expected to be able to handle this traffic, and this traffic meets their network stress testing policy.

Tests that purposefully attempt to overwhelm the target and/or infrastructure with packet or connection flooding attacks, reflection/amplification attacks or other large volumes of traffic are not considered network stress tests but are considered distributed denial of service (DDoS) tests. Volumetric network-based DDoS simulations are explicitly prohibited from the Amazon EC2 platform and are not covered by these guidelines. Customers wishing to perform a DDoS simulation test should review our DDoS Simulation Testing policy.

When performing a network stress test from EC2, you should ensure that your endpoints are in the local AWS Region if they are hosted within AWS. AWS may employ traffic engineering or traffic shaping operations in some cases where traffic surges exceed 25Gbps or over 100Gbps depending on the network paths and AWS Regions involved. AWS reserves the right to limit your network traffic if it violates the AWS Acceptable Use Policy as well.