AWS Fault Injection Simulator features

AWS Fault Injection Simulator is a fully managed fault injection service that makes it easier for teams to discover an application’s weaknesses at scale in order to improve performance, observability, and resiliency.  You can find a list of supported fault injections here.

AWS Fault Injection Simulator supports best practice chaos engineering parameters to make it easy to get started building and running fault injection experiments, without needing to install any agents. Sample experiments are available to use as a starting point. Fully managed fault injection actions are used to define actions such as stopping an instance, throttling an API, and failing over a database. Fault Injection Simulator supports Amazon CloudWatch so that you can use your existing metrics to monitor Fault Injection Simulator experiments.

Simplistic scenarios can be insufficient to create the real-world conditions that cause failure so AWS Fault Injection Simulator supports gradually and simultaneously impairing performance of different types of resources, APIs, services, and geographic locations. Affected resources can be randomized, and custom fault types can be created using AWS Systems Manager to further increase complexity.

When running experiments in live environments, there’s a risk of unintended impact. To provide guardrails and keep your fault injection experiments under control, AWS Fault Injection Simulator allow you to target based on environments, application, and other dimensions using tags. For example, you could increase CPU utilization on 10% of your instances with the tag “environment”:“prod”. Fault Injection Simulator also has the option to set rules based on Amazon CloudWatch Alarms or other tools to stop an experiment. For example, an experiment can be set to stop before completion if a web page response time decreases below an acceptable level.

AWS Fault Injection Simulator is integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) so that you can control which users and resources have permission to access and run Fault Injection Simulator experiments, and which resources and services can be affected.

AWS Fault Injection Simulator provides visibility throughout every stage of an experiment via the console and APIs. As an experiment is running you can observe what actions have executed. After an experiment has completed you can see details on what actions were run, if stop conditions were triggered, how metrics compared to your expected steady state, and more. To support accurate operational metrics and effective troubleshooting, you can also identify what resources and APIs are affected by a Fault Injection Simulator experiment.

You can use AWS Fault Injection Simulator with the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and AWS SDKs. The Fault Injection Simulator APIs allow you to programmatically access the service so that you can integrate fault injection testing into your continuous integration and continuous delivery (or CI/CD) pipeline, and custom tooling.