REL12-BP05: Test resiliency using chaos engineering
Proactively inject failures into your system to identify weaknesses and validate recovery mechanisms. Use chaos engineering principles to build confidence in system resilience by testing failure scenarios in controlled environments.
Implementation Steps
1. Start with Hypothesis-Driven Experiments
Define clear hypotheses about system behavior during failures before conducting experiments.
2. Begin in Non-Production Environments
Start chaos experiments in development and staging environments before production.
3. Implement Gradual Failure Injection
Start with small, controlled failures and gradually increase complexity and scope.
4. Monitor System Behavior
Collect comprehensive metrics during experiments to understand system response.
5. Automate Chaos Engineering
Build automated chaos engineering into your regular testing and deployment processes.
Detailed Implementation
AWS Services
Primary Services
- AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS): Managed chaos engineering service
- Amazon EC2: Instance termination and resource stress testing
- Amazon CloudWatch: Monitoring and metrics during experiments
- AWS Systems Manager: Command execution for chaos injection
Supporting Services
- AWS Lambda: Event-driven chaos experiment automation
- Amazon SNS: Notifications for experiment status and results
- AWS Step Functions: Complex chaos experiment workflows
- Amazon S3: Storage for experiment results and analysis
Benefits
- Proactive Resilience Testing: Identify weaknesses before they cause outages
- Confidence Building: Validate that recovery mechanisms work as expected
- Improved Incident Response: Practice responding to failures in controlled environments
- System Understanding: Gain deeper insights into system behavior under stress
- Continuous Improvement: Regular chaos experiments drive ongoing resilience improvements