Posted On: Oct 22, 2021

You can now inject Amazon EC2 Spot Instance interruptions into your Spot Instance workloads using AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS). Spot Instances enable you to run compute workloads on Amazon EC2 at steep discounts in exchange for returning the Spot Instances when Amazon EC2 needs the capacity back. Because it is always possible that your Spot Instance may be interrupted, you should ensure that your application is prepared for a Spot Instance interruption. However, until now it has been difficult to recreate the circumstances of a Spot Instance interruption in order to evaluate and improve how your application responds.

Now, using AWS FIS, you can simulate what happens when Amazon EC2 reclaims Spot Instances by simply running an AWS FIS experiment, allowing you to observe how your applications responds so that you can improve their performance and resiliency. The Spot Instance interruptions that are injected by your AWS FIS experiments behave in the same way as they do when reclaimed by Amazon EC2 — including instance termination notifications, rebalance notifications, and the interruption behaviors you have specified — so that you can accurately reproduce real-world conditions. You can also easily configure safeguards such as alarms, stop conditions, and rollback steps to help build confidence in your experiments even when running them in production.

To learn more about using AWS FIS experiments to inject Spot Instance interruptions, visit Amazon EC2 actions in the AWS FIS user guide. In addition to Spot Instance interruptions, you can use AWS FIS to simulate other faults such as Amazon EC2 API errors as well as disruptions to On-Demand or Reserved Instances, RDS database instances, ECS containers, and EKS node groups. AWS FIS and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are available in all public AWS Regions.