aws introduces new chaos engineering as a service offering
Major organizations, such as Netflix and Amazon, employ chaos engineering tools to assess the robustness of their systems. These tools allow them to replicate critical situations and identify potential vulnerabilities proactively. At AWS re:Invent, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, unveiled the company’s new Chaos Engineering as a Service solution, known as AWS Fault Injection Simulator.
Although the service’s name might not be particularly striking, Vogels emphasized its purpose is to extend this functionality to businesses of all sizes. “Our belief is that chaos engineering should be accessible to all, not limited to organizations operating at the scale of Amazon or Netflix. Therefore, I’m pleased to announce a new service designed to streamline the execution of chaos experiments within the cloud,” Vogels stated.
As he detailed, the primary objective of chaos engineering is to determine how your application behaves when confronted with problems by deliberately introducing failures, typically within live production environments. AWS Fault Injection Simulator provides a completely managed service for conducting these experiments on applications hosted on AWS infrastructure.
“FIS simplifies the process of conducting secure experiments. It was developed to align with the standard chaos experimentation process: first, establish a baseline understanding of your system’s normal operation, then formulate a hypothesis, and finally, introduce faults into your application. Upon experiment completion, FIS will inform you whether your hypothesis was validated, and you can leverage the data gathered by CloudWatch to identify areas for enhancement,” he clarified.Vogels announced the service today, but indicated its actual release is planned for sometime in the coming year.
It is important to recognize that other companies, such as Gremlin, already offer comparable Chaos Engineering as a Service solutions.
Ron Miller