Guess what Amazon Web Services (AWS) just dropped at their AWS re:Invent event? A cool update – an outage simulator tagged onto their Fault Injection Service (FIS). This little gem is like a superhero tool for businesses, helping them figure out how tough they really are when hit with major outages.
Now, let’s talk reality. In a world where geopolitical tensions make us all a bit nervous about potential cloud service meltdowns, having a way to test your resilience is gold. AWS gets it, and with this new outage simulator, they’re giving businesses the chance to do some “chaos engineering at scale.” Picture this: simulating scenarios like a full power outage in an AWS Availability Zone or losing connectivity to another AWS region.
So, why is this a game-changer? It’s a proactive move for engineers to understand their dependencies – the ones they see coming and the sneaky indirect ones. Plus, it’s a practical way to put their recovery plans to the test after a hypothetical outage hits.
Let’s break down the cool features. First up, we’ve got the “AZ Availability: Power Interruption.” It’s like yanking out the plug, but in a controlled setting. This simulation zeros in on resources in an Availability Zone, playing with the likes of EC2 instances, EBS volumes, Auto Scaling Groups, VPC subnets, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis clusters, and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) clusters.
But wait, there’s more! Enter the “Cross-Region: Connectivity” test. This one shakes things up by blocking applications from reaching resources in a chosen region. It’s a hit to a bunch of components, including EC2 instances, ECS tasks, EKS pods, Lambda functions attached to a VPC, and even traffic flowing across Transit Gateways and VPC peering connections.
