AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) launches new test scenarios for partial failures

AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) now offers two new scenarios that help you proactively test how your applications handle partial disruptions within and across Availability Zones (AZs). These disruptions, often called gray failures, are more common than complete outages and can be particularly challenging to detect and mitigate.

The FIS scenario library provides AWS-created, pre-defined experiment templates that minimize the heavy lifting of designing tests. The new scenarios expand the testing capabilities for partial disruptions. "AZ: Application Slowdown" lets you test for increased latency and degraded performance for resources, dependencies, and connections within a single AZ. This helps validate observability setups, tune alarm thresholds, and practice critical operational decisions like AZ evacuation. The scenario works with both single and multi-AZ applications. "Cross-AZ: Traffic Slowdown" enables testing of how multi-AZ applications handle traffic disruptions between AZs.

With both scenarios, you can target specific portions of your application traffic for more realistic testing of partial disruptions. These scenarios are particularly valuable for testing application sensitivity to these more subtle disruptions that often manifest as traffic and application slowdowns. For instance, you can test how your application responds to degraded network paths causing packet loss for some traffic flows, or misconfigured connection pools that slow down specific requests.

To get started, access these new scenarios through the FIS scenario library in the AWS Management Console. These new scenarios are available in all AWS Regions where AWS FIS is available, including AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, visit the FIS scenario library user guide. For pricing information, visit the FIS pricing page.