Chaos in the Cloud

A Introduction to Chaos Engineering and Amazon's Fault Injection Service

This is the first in a series of articles looking at chaos engineering in general, and in particular how we can use Amazon’s Fault Injection Service to test the resilience of our AWS systems.

When I first started developing, we wrote huge, monolithic applications either running locally on our desktops, or in our datacenters. We’d write applications that had tens or even hundreds of thousands of lines of code. However, the applications we wrote usually consisted of a single component, maybe two if we used a database, handling all of the logic and functionality within a single application. Whilst this meant that we usually had complex, hard to navigate, code bases, it did mean that in terms of architecture, our applications were relatively simple.

Now You See Me, Now You Don't - the Mystery of the Vanishing S3 Objects

One of the great things about my role as a consultant at GlobalLogic is that sometimes I’ll be asked to help out on what at first glance can be a simple problem, but as I investigate, I get a chance to uncover some unusual or forgotten features.

Recently, I was working on a project and was asked if I could help solve an issue that had been puzzling a developer. They had deployed a system where some objects uploaded to an S3 bucket seemed to disappear and then reappear; it was time to start digging.