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Chaos Engineering

Chaos Engineering on Kubernetes EKS

Demo Memory Stress on EKS Part 3

In this tutorial, you’ll create an AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) experiment template that injects memory stress into a pod running on Amazon EKS. You will configure the fault action, define the target pods, and execute the experiment while monitoring performance in real time.

Prerequisites

  • An AWS account with administrative permissions
  • An existing Amazon EKS cluster (e.g., pet-site)
  • A Kubernetes service account IAM role with FIS permissions
  • AWS FIS enabled in your account

1. Create the FIS Experiment Template

1.1 Configure Basic Settings

  1. Sign in to the AWS FIS console and go to Experiment templates.
  2. Click Create experiment template.
  3. Provide the following details:
    • Name: EKS-Memory-Stress
    • Description: Inject memory stress into pods on EKS for resilience testing

1.2 Add a Memory Stress Action

  1. Under Actions, click Add action.
  2. Set these parameters:
    • Action name: eks-memory
    • Action type: aws:eks:inject-fault
    • Fault action: Pod Memory Stress

The image shows a form for adding an action in an experiment template, specifically for an EKS memory stress test, with fields for name, description, action type, and target.

1.3 Specify Action Parameters

Configure the memory stress parameters:

ParameterValue
Duration9 minutes
RoleKubernetes service account IAM role for FIS
Percentage50

Blast Radius Control

Setting Percentage to 50 limits memory consumption to half of available memory on targeted pods.

The image shows a configuration interface for setting optional parameters related to Kubernetes fault orchestration, including fields for annotations, labels, security policy, and memory usage settings.

2. Define the Target Pods

  1. In the Targets section, click Add target.
  2. Enter the following values:
    • Cluster: pet-site
    • Namespace: default
    • Selector type: Label
    • Selector value: app=pet-site

The image shows a configuration screen for an AWS EKS memory stress test, with actions and targets specified for a pod.

  1. Review and save the target configuration.

The image shows a configuration screen for setting up an EKS-Memory action in a cloud service interface, with fields for resource parameters and selection options.

3. Review and Create

  1. Verify all settings:
    • Action: eks-memory (Pod Memory Stress)
    • Target: Pods labeled app=pet-site in the default namespace on pet-site cluster
  2. Attach the experiment IAM role to allow publishing logs to CloudWatch.
  3. Click Create experiment template.

4. Execute and Monitor the Experiment

  1. From the Experiment templates list, select EKS-Memory-Stress and click Start experiment.
  2. Let the experiment run for the configured duration (9 minutes).
  3. Monitor performance metrics in:
    • CloudWatch RUM
    • EKS container performance dashboards

Compare metrics before, during, and after the memory stress injection to evaluate the resilience of your application.

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Demo Memory Stress on EKS Part 2
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Demo Memory Stress on EKS Part 4