Test AWS Step Functions reliability with Gremlin Failure Flags. Inject latency and errors into Lambda tasks to validate retry and catch logic.
AWS Step Functions makes orchestration visible, which creates a sense that failure is handled. The state machine diagram shows retries and catch blocks, so the workflow looks robust. What the diagram doesn't show is whether those policies match how the underlying tasks actually fail.
Add Failure Flags to the Lambda tasks behind your state machine and you can test each step independently. With Gremlin, you can:
- Find out which errors your catch blocks catch. Trigger an exception at a specific step and watch whether the workflow routes to the error branch or falls through.
- Catch tasks that hang rather than error. A stalled task may never trigger a catch block at all. Injecting latency reveals whether anything eventually times out.
- Check your retry policy against a real outage. Counts and backoff intervals chosen for a transient blip become an amplifier when a dependency is genuinely down.
Workflows that sit in a running state for hours don't alert anyone, because nothing errored. Testing turns the diagram into evidence.
Dependencies: Failure Test
Simulate a failed dependency by dropping all network traffic to the dependency.
Dependencies: Latency Test
Recreate poor network conditions by delaying all network traffic to a dependency by 100ms.
Unreliable Networks - Dependencies
Simulate unreliable network conditions when communicating with dependencies by adding latency to API calls. Test whether your users are affected when dependency response times degrade.
* Failure Flags works wherever you can add the SDK to your application and run the Gremlin sidecar. Not every language and platform combination has been individually tested, and not all are officially supported. Check our compatibility documentation for what's verified, or get in touch if you don't see your runtime.
Intelligent Health Checks - AWS
Automatically monitor your AWS services during testing in one-click with Intelligent Health Checks.
AWS integration
Integrate Gremlin with your AWS account for automatic Health Check creation, service discovery, and more.
Using Failure Flags by proxy
Use Failure Flags, Gremlin's application-level fault injection feature, without changing a single line of code.
Installing Gremlin on Amazon ECS
Learn how to install Gremlin on EC2-backed Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) deployments.
Installing Gremlin on AWS - Configuring your VPC
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unique networking requirements that must be implemented for Gremlin to run successfully…
Avoid downtime. Use Gremlin to turn failure into resilience.
Gremlin empowers you to proactively root out failure before it causes downtime. See how you can harness chaos to build resilient systems by requesting a demo of Gremlin.
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