The accelerated shift to the cloud has made XaaS — everything-as-a-service — a forecasted leading tech trend for 2021. The XaaS model has the potential to not only drastically cut costs but also simplify tech deployments.
When conglomerates like Netflix or Amazon want to test the resilience of their systems, they use chaos engineering tools, which help to simulate emergencies and worst-case scenarios to find potential issues before they even happen. It is comparative to running fire-drills within increasingly complex IT engine rooms. The motivation? A breakdown or interruption to services can be extremely damaging for digital businesses – just look at the recent outages at Google Cloud and Workspace.
Now AWS has announced that with the launch of its Fault Injection Simulator, it hopes to bring chaos engineering to the mainstream as a new XaaS offering.
“We believe that chaos engineering is for everyone, not just shops running at Amazon or Netflix scale. And that’s why today I’m excited to pre-announce a new service built to simplify the process of running chaos experiments in the cloud,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said at AWS re:Invent.
At the time of announcement, FIS supports running experiments against EC2, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), ECS, and RDS. Auto-roll backs and the ability to stop upon reaching certain conditions allow for safe running of experiments within production. The service supports gradually and simultaneously impairing performance of resources, APIs, services, and geographic locations. Pre-built templates will be provided to generate the disruptions. Disruptions include service latency, database errors, increased CPU, and increased memory.
So far, the practice has been reserved for tech giants such as Uber, JP Morgan Chase, and Amazon itself.
While outages of Google Cloud and Workspace, or trading apps, e-commerce websites, and streaming services can seem trivial, the implications of ensuring resilience takes a more serious turn when you consider how chaos engineering can support the more central role of software today in healthcare, online voting, and autonomous driving applications.
While the company announced the new offering on December 15, Vogels said that it won’t actually be available until sometime in 2021.
