Improve resilience of low latency applications with Amazon EBS and AWS FIS

This article explains how to use AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) to test application resilience against Amazon EBS storage latency issues through chaos engineering.

• AWS FIS now supports configurable I/O latency injection on EBS volumes for realistic testing
• Enables validation of database failover, transaction handling, and timeout configurations under degraded conditions
• Financial services customer validated mission-critical transaction platform with latency thresholds of 3ms small I/O, 10ms large I/O
• Seven-step walkthrough: create FIS template, set IAM role, configure CloudWatch stop conditions, run experiment, monitor states, review logs
• CloudWatch alarms automatically stop experiments if metrics exceed defined thresholds for safety
• Customer discovered 3ms latency exceeded business SLAs, implemented automatic failover to secondary region
• Iterative approach: analyze failures, review monitoring, improve architecture, re-test, integrate into CI/CD pipelines

AWS FIS enables organizations to proactively test storage resilience and identify architectural improvements before production incidents occur.