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    Glossary

    AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS)

    Architecture & Design

    AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) is the managed service for running chaos engineering experiments on AWS. You define an experiment template with three parts: targets (the resources to affect), actions (the faults to inject), and stop conditions (CloudWatch alarms that abort the experiment if it crosses a safety threshold).

    Common Actions

    • aws:ec2:stop-instances and aws:ec2:terminate-instances for compute failure
    • aws:ssm:send-command with the AWSFIS-Run documents for CPU, memory, and network stress
    • aws:network:disrupt-connectivity for Availability Zone and dependency isolation
    • aws:rds:failover-db-cluster and aws:dynamodb:global-table-pause-replication for data-tier faults
    • aws:ecs:stop-task and the Lambda invocation actions for containers and serverless

    FIS has no native scheduler; recurring experiments are driven by Amazon EventBridge Scheduler or a CI/CD pipeline calling the StartExperiment API.

    Related Content

    Chaos Engineering on AWS: Your First Experiment with AWS FISChaos Engineering on AWS: CPU, Memory, and Network Faults with AWS FIS and SSM

    Related Terms

    Chaos Engineering

    The practice of deliberately injecting failures into a system to discover weaknesses before they cause outages, by forming a hypothesis about steady state and testing it under real-world fault conditions.

    Steady State

    A measurable definition of a system operating normally (such as p99 latency, error rate, or throughput) that a chaos experiment uses as its baseline and watches to decide whether a fault caused real impact.

    Static Stability

    A resilience property where a workload keeps operating during a failure using resources it already has, instead of relying on launching or changing resources during the failure (which is when control planes are most likely to be impaired).

    Chaos EngineeringSteady State

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