You're so worried about AWS reliability, the cloud giant now lets you simulate major outages

By The Register's count, Amazon Web Services has made at least 192 product announcements in the past four days at its re:Invent conference. But only one has made your correspondent worry: news that Amazon customers have been asking it to offer simulations of what happens when an entire availability zone – a group of …

[Auntie Dix]

This totally makes sense for European customers try and learn on their resilience, and ultimately comply with the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) which requires active participation of third-party ICT service provider.

[Anonymous Coward]

Simulate? Why?

As an AWS customer, having AWS network outages on a regular basis is normal. I don't need to simluate them.

[Claptrap314]

Re: Simulate? Why?

Go home Bill--no body care about you any more.

[Pierre 1970]

The regular outages are business as usual... in AWS you usually architect your solution base on that. And for the big ones...they are so creative and original in nature that I cannot see a way to simulate that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who me worry :)

“the service allows users to stage fake faults so they can test their ability to recover from the unexpected.”

Assuming you're running a database in the “Cloud”. If the VM crashes, when it restarts does the database resume in a consistent state. As in, on an old-fashioned server. You run the database on a RAID array. Transactions are enabled on the database. On reboot, the OS restores the database from the journal to a consistent state. If you can't achieve this in the “Cloud” then what am I paying for again?

[Peter-Waterman1]

Re: Who me worry :)

err.... you can

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Who me worry :)

You are paying for the label, the brand, the image, the boardroom buzzword bingo compliance, and the smug self-assuredness you are allowed to display when others know that your company is mod, happening, with it, at the leading edge. Stop, wait, The Cloud is no longer mod, it's yesterday's news, common, and as average and boring as "Expert Systems" and "DevOps". Orange is the new pink, AI/ML is where it's at, you'd better invest in the future, AI/ML is The Next Big Thing ...

[Kev99]

Does AWS also let users test how impervious their bunch of holes held together with vapor is? That's what a cloud is.

[An_Old_Dog]

From TFA: Which is things get a little scary -- AWS has described these scenarios as "highly requested."

I don't see requesting test-fault-injection for such scenarios as "a little scary" at all. At least, competent system people want to test their systems as much as they can.

If you're wise, you don't wait until you're cruising down the highway and the rain is pouring into your open-roofed Caterham 7 before thinking about and implementing your rain mitigations. Same idea for computer systems.