Improving Application Performance with AWS Fault Injection Service

Introduction

AWS Fault Injection Service (AWS FIS) is a fully managed solution to facilitate fault injection experiments on your AWS workloads. Rooted in the principles of chaos engineering, these experiments deliberately introduce disruptive events to assess how your application reacts. By leveraging this data, you can enhance the performance and resilience of your applications, ensuring they meet expected behavior standards.

Utilizing AWS Fault Injection Service involves configuring and executing experiments to replicate real-world scenarios, revealing potential application issues that might be challenging to identify through conventional means. AWS FIS offers predefined templates that initiate disruptions and include essential controls and guardrails for conducting experiments in a production environment. These controls may involve automated actions, such as rolling back or halting the experiment based on predefined conditions.

AWS FIS concepts

To leverage AWS Fault Injection Service, conduct experiments on your AWS resources to validate hypotheses regarding the performance of an application or system in the face of fault conditions. The process begins by crafting an experiment template, serving as the comprehensive blueprint that outlines the actions, targets, and stop conditions for the experiment. Subsequently, this template is employed to execute the experiment. Throughout the experiment’s runtime, you can monitor its progress and assess its status. The experiment concludes once all specified actions within it have been executed.

Actions: Actions within AWS Fault Injection Service (AWS FIS) represent the operations conducted on an AWS resource throughout an experiment. AWS FIS offers a collection of pre-configured actions tailored to the type of AWS resource involved. These actions run for a specified duration within the experiment or until manually halted. They can be executed sequentially or concurrently in parallel.

Targets: Targets in AWS FIS refer to one or more AWS resources on which the service performs actions during an experiment. Users can designate specific resources or choose a group based on particular criteria, such as tags or state.

Stop Conditions: AWS FIS introduces controls and safeguards crucial for executing experiments securely on AWS workloads. A stop condition serves as a mechanism to terminate an experiment when it reaches a predefined threshold set as an Amazon CloudWatch alarm. AWS FIS promptly halts the ongoing experiment if a stop condition is triggered while the experiment is in progress.

Supported AWS services

AWS FIS offers ready-made actions for specific target types across various AWS services. The supported actions for target resources encompass a range of AWS services, including but not limited to:

• Amazon CloudWatch
• Amazon EBS
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon ECS
• Amazon EKS
• Amazon ElastiCache
• Amazon RDS
• AWS Systems Manager
• Amazon VPC

When conducting single-account experiments, the target resources must reside within the same AWS account as the experiment. For scenarios where you need to target resources in a different AWS account, AWS FIS can execute multi-account experiments.

Access AWS FIS

1. AWS Management Console: Utilize the AWS Management Console, offering a user-friendly web interface for seamless interaction with AWS FIS. Refer to the Working with the AWS Management Console guide for detailed instructions.
2. AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI): Leverage the AWS CLI, a command-line tool compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux. This versatile tool encompasses various AWS services, including AWS FIS. Explore the AWS CLI Command Reference, specifically the ‘fis’ commands, for comprehensive details.
3. AWS CloudFormation: Employ AWS CloudFormation to create templates describing your AWS resources. These templates serve as a unified means to provision and manage resources. Access the AWS Fault Injection Service resource type reference for comprehensive guidance.
4. AWS SDKs: Leverage AWS SDKs, providing language-specific APIs that handle connection details such as signature calculation, request retries, and error handling. Detailed information on AWS SDKs is available for your reference.
5. HTTPS API: Access the low-level API actions through HTTPS requests using the HTTPS API. To thoroughly understand these API actions, consult the AWS Fault Injection Service API Reference.

Conclusion

The service prioritizes safety by incorporating essential controls, including automated actions for precise experimentation. Leveraging AWS FIS insights enables organizations to proactively enhance application resilience, ensuring consistent adherence to expected behavior standards. AWS FIS is a valuable tool for continuous improvement and risk mitigation in the dynamic realm of cloud-based applications.

Drop a query if you have any questions regarding AWS Fault Injection Service and we will get back to you quickly.

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