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.