The AWS Fault Injection Simulator is bringing chaos as a service to users sometime in 2021. While not new, such a widespread offering provides easier access to the extra layer of security.
A little more than a week ago, AWS announced that chaos engineering as a service would be available in 2021. First developed by Neflix a decade ago, chaos engineering is designed to test your applications response to a worst-case-scenario event. It can be used in pre-production or once an application has been released, and provides a comprehensive report indicating response times, pain points and other security and configuration problems. Chaos engineering is not new, but with AWSs Fault Injection Simulator added to their service list, it’s likely to become much more widely used.
There are currently chaos engineering as a service providers out there like Gremlin, Chaos Monkey, ChaosBlade, ToxiProxy, Kubernetes and more. Gremlin actually has a nice comparison of each product on their website, complete with pros and cons of each service. Since Amazon’s service has not yet been released, it’s not on the list (which was updated in October), so it will be interesting to see how the AWS service compares to what is currently out there.
What will be even more interesting to see is what happens to pricing once AWS releases their service. Currently, Gremlin charges $750/hour for a single application, and if more is needed the website says to call. Since Amazon is a giant corporation and is adding it to their already extensive list of cloud services, we could see those prices come down. Or they could stay the same, but the reach of AWS’s cloud services provides an additional benefit for everyone: More widespread use of this service due to ease of access.
Business owners do not want a plethora of bills to pay at the end of every month. Not just in total cost, but in the number of accounts they need. The more simplified services are, the more they can be combined, the more likely a business is to use them. Especially a small business with a limited budget and only a handful of personnel on staff. Small businesses, which are notorious for skimping on security in general due to budgeting and lack of knowledge, could really benefit from this kind of testing. It’s automated, it’s tailored specifically for what the business needs and/or wants to review, and it’s already built in to the other services they are paying for.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels had this to say about their Fault Injection Simulator (FIS), “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.
“FIS makes it easy to run safe experiments. We built it to follow the typical chaos experimental workflow where you understand your steady state, set a hypothesis and inject faults into your application. When the experiment is over, FIS will tell you if your hypothesis was confirmed, and you can use the data collected by CloudWatch to decide where you need to make improvements,” he explained.
Having more options for security is never going to be a bad thing. Security requires layers, depth for stability and functionality. Chaos engineering as a service is going to make the entire business community better. Security has been a major thorn in the side of the global economy for months, no business has been exempt. Every business is looking for new ways to keep their sensitive data safe, and chaos engineering may well be the next big thing.
No, this idea is not new, but it has never been available at this level. Typically, chaos engineering has been utilized by large corporations with various products and features, but at the price range you saw above, it’s largely been out of reach for small/medium sized businesses. With the release of the AWS Fault Injection Simulator, chaos engineering use will hopefully increase, giving businesses more depth in security.