Amazon wants you to break your cloud to make it more resilient

Amazon has announced a new service to help Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers ensure their cloud computing environments are resilient.

As its name suggests, the new AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) allows users to inject different types of faults and simulate failures and server errors to check whether their clouds can withstand such architectural break-downs.

Tools such as FIS are known as Chaos Engineering tools and allow companies to stress test their cloud environments and apps to find and fix weaknesses.

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Chaotic clouds

By offering the tools as a service, Amazon wants to make chaos engineering tools available to everyone, which are generally considered the staple of large companies.

“We believe that chaos engineering is for everyone, not just shops running at Amazon or Netflix scale,” said Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels. Vogels believes that FIS is “built to simplify the process of running chaos experiments in the cloud.”

Vogels further explained that FIS is offered as a fully managed service that’ll allow users to simulate failures and run experiments on applications running on their AWS hardware.

Workflow of FIS — (Image credit: Amazon)

“We built it to follow the typical chaos experimental workflow where you understand your steady state, set a hypothesis and inject faults into your application. When the experiment is over, FIS will tell you if your hypothesis was confirmed, and you can use the data collected by CloudWatch to decide where you need to make improvements,” explains Vogels.

FIS can be used with services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud 2 (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and others, and will be available sometime in 2021.