Gremlin vs AWS FIS: Multi-cloud reliability management vs. AWS fault tool
Compare Gremlin and AWS Fault Injection Service across infrastructure coverage, safety, pricing, enterprise features, and AI capabilities. See which tool fits your reliability needs.
Gremlin vs. AWS FIS, side by side
Gremlin is an enterprise reliability management platform that helps organizations measure, manage, and improve reliability across their entire infrastructure — including AWS, where it supports the same services FIS does (and more), plus bare metal, on-prem, Azure, GCP, and multi-cloud environments. AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) is a managed fault injection tool scoped exclusively to AWS.
If your entire stack runs on AWS and you need a lightweight way to run fault injection tests on individual services, FIS gets you started quickly. But if you want to go beyond individual tests — measuring reliability across hundreds of services, giving engineering leadership forward-looking data, running on multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure, or simply getting more out of your AWS testing with reliability scoring and org-wide management — Gremlin does all of that, starting with the same AWS services FIS covers.
Gremlin vs. AWS FIS, side by side
Gremlin is a reliability management platform used by hundreds of the world's largest enterprises—including four of the five largest US banks—to systematically measure, manage, and improve the reliability of their services and applications.
Gremlin works everywhere your applications run: AWS (including EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, and more), Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, bare metal, on-prem, and hybrid environments. On AWS, Gremlin can run the same kinds of fault injection experiments as FIS—resource exhaustion, network disruption, state changes—with the addition of a broader reliability management framework that includes reliability scoring, automated test suites, passive risk detection, dependency mapping, and executive reporting.
Unlike traditional chaos engineering tools that focus on running individual experiments, Gremlin combines active failure testing and passive risk detection to produce a standardized reliability score for each service. Those scores roll up across teams, giving engineering leaders a forward-looking reliability metric that they can use to prioritize investments, track progress, and prove results to leadership. It's purpose-built for enterprise organizations where reliability is a business-critical concern, and where the cost of an outage goes far beyond engineering time.
AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) is a managed AWS service that lets you run fault injection experiments against AWS resources. Combined with AWS Resilience Hub, it provides policy-based resilience testing and governance for applications built on AWS.
FIS integrates tightly with the AWS ecosystem: CloudWatch for monitoring, Systems Manager for execution, and Resilience Hub for governance policies. If you're an AWS-native team looking to run targeted fault injection tests on supported AWS services, FIS offers a low-barrier entry point that leverages your existing AWS environment.
Which one is right for you?
- You want a tool that can test your AWS services (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, and more) and also covers Azure, GCP, on-prem, and bare metal — all from one platform.
- You want to measure reliability across your organization with standardized scores and benchmarks.
- You want forward-looking reliability data to justify investments and track progress, not just pass/fail test logs.
- You're in a regulated industry where independent compliance (SOC 2, HIPAA) and on-prem deployment are requirements.
- You want predictable pricing that doesn't penalize you for testing more frequently.
- Disaster recovery testing is a major use case, especially if you're under regulatory pressure.
- You want AI-powered recommendations built on real-world reliability expertise, not generic best practices.
- You're already on AWS and want to do everything FIS does, plus reliability scoring, org-wide standardization, and executive reporting.
- Your entire infrastructure runs on AWS with no multi-cloud, hybrid, or on-prem components.
- You're still new to fault injection and want a low-barrier entry point within your existing AWS stack.
- You want to run a few one-off experiments rather than build an ongoing reliability practice.
Common questions
This is the most common concern we hear—and it's usually backwards. Waiting until you're "ready" for reliability engineering is like waiting until you're in shape to start exercising. Gremlin is how you get there. Built-in safety mechanisms and guided onboarding ensure you can start without risk. The real risk is waiting.
This is the most common concern we hear—and it's usually backwards. Waiting until you're "ready" for reliability engineering is like waiting until you're in shape to start exercising. Gremlin is how you get there. Built-in safety mechanisms and guided onboarding ensure you can start without risk. The real risk is waiting.
This is the most common concern we hear—and it's usually backwards. Waiting until you're "ready" for reliability engineering is like waiting until you're in shape to start exercising. Gremlin is how you get there. Built-in safety mechanisms and guided onboarding ensure you can start without risk. The real risk is waiting.
This is the most common concern we hear—and it's usually backwards. Waiting until you're "ready" for reliability engineering is like waiting until you're in shape to start exercising. Gremlin is how you get there. Built-in safety mechanisms and guided onboarding ensure you can start without risk. The real risk is waiting.
This is the most common concern we hear—and it's usually backwards. Waiting until you're "ready" for reliability engineering is like waiting until you're in shape to start exercising. Gremlin is how you get there. Built-in safety mechanisms and guided onboarding ensure you can start without risk. The real risk is waiting.
This is the most common concern we hear—and it's usually backwards. Waiting until you're "ready" for reliability engineering is like waiting until you're in shape to start exercising. Gremlin is how you get there. Built-in safety mechanisms and guided onboarding ensure you can start without risk. The real risk is waiting.
This is the most common concern we hear—and it's usually backwards. Waiting until you're "ready" for reliability engineering is like waiting until you're in shape to start exercising. Gremlin is how you get there. Built-in safety mechanisms and guided onboarding ensure you can start without risk. The real risk is waiting.