Break and Fix Your AWS EKS Microservices with Chaos Monkey & FIS: A Practical Guide to Resilient Cloud Systems

Break and Fix Your AWS EKS Microservices with Chaos Monkey & FIS to test your system’s ability to withstand failure—on purpose. In a production environment, downtime isn’t a luxury.

Chaos Engineering forces you to ask the hard question: What happens when things break?

This guide takes you from theory to practice, helping you simulate failure in both Kubernetes and AWS-managed services using Kube‑Monkey and AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS).

Prerequisites

To successfully break and fix your AWS EKS microservices with Chaos Monkey & FIS, make sure you have:

  • An AWS Account with access to EKS, RDS, ElastiCache, MSK, ACM, KMS, Route 53, and FIS
  • A running EKS Cluster (use eksctl create cluster or the AWS Console)
  • Installed and configured tools: kubectl, helm, and aws-cli
  • An IAM role with fault injection permissions (see below)

Step 1: Deploy Kube‑Monkey in Your EKS Cluster

Kube‑Monkey simulates Chaos Monkey-style random pod terminations in Kubernetes.

This helps test how well your microservices recover from unexpected crashes.

Install using Helm:

helm repo add kube-monkey https://asobti.github.io/kube-monkey/charts/repo
helm repo update
helm install kube-monkey kube-monkey/kube-monkey –namespace kube-system

Verify deployment:

kubectl get pods -n kube-system -l app=kube-monkey

Opt-in Services for Chaos Testing

To participate, deployments must be explicitly labelled:

metadata:
labels:
kube-monkey/enabled: “enabled”
kube-monkey/mtbf: “1”
kube-monkey/kill-mode: “fixed”
kube-monkey/kill-value: “1”

This config tells Kube‑Monkey to kill one pod per day.

Step 2: Set Up IAM Role for AWS FIS

AWS FIS allows you to simulate real faults in AWS services. First, create a role (AWSFISExperimentRole) with permissions like:

{
“Version”: “2012-10-17”,
“Statement”: [
{“Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: [“rds:RebootDBInstance”], “Resource”: ““}, {“Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: [“elasticache:TestFailover”], “Resource”: ““},
{“Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: [“kafka:RebootBroker”], “Resource”: ““}, {“Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: [“acm:UpdateCertificateOptions”], “Resource”: ““},
{“Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: [“kms:DisableKey”], “Resource”: ““}, {“Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: [“route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets”], “Resource”: ““}
]
}

Step 3: Create FIS Experiment Templates

Use AWS FIS to simulate service disruptions across key infrastructure components.

Examples:

  • Reboot RDS instances to simulate DB crashes
  • Trigger ElastiCache failovers to test the caching layer stability
  • Restart MSK brokers for message queue resilience
  • Disable ACM/KMS keys to test security and access controls
  • KMS Key Disable
  • Delete Route 53 records to validate DNS failure fallback

Each experiment is defined via a JSON template and launched via:

aws fis create-experiment-template –cli-input-json file://

Step 4: Monitor & Analyse Results

Monitoring Tools:

  • kubectl get pods --watch
  • CloudWatch Dashboards for latency, throughput, and alarm triggers
  • EFK stack or CloudWatch Logs for service-level diagnostics

Key Metrics:

  • MTTD – Mean Time to Detect
  • MTTR – Mean Time to Recover
  • Error rate and latency trends

These insights help you break and fix your AWS EKS microservices effectively, ensuring they recover gracefully from failure.

Step 5: Automate Your Chaos Workflow

Chaos shouldn’t be a one-time stunt. Automate it via:

ToolUse Case
CI/CDInject chaos after deployment
EventBridgeSchedule weekly disruptions
CloudWatch Alarms + SNSNotify teams via Slack or email

Chaos automation ensures your systems are continuously prepared, not just during testing cycles.

Why You Should Break and Fix Your AWS EKS Microservices with Chaos Monkey & FIS

  • Reveal hidden single points of failure
  • Improve service durability and uptime
  • Build engineering confidence
  • Reduce incident response time
  • Strengthen observability and monitoring practices

Final Thought

To break and fix your AWS EKS microservices with Chaos Monkey & FIS is to truly prepare them for the real world.

Every system fails eventually—what matters is how quickly it recovers. With the right tools, strategy, and mindset, chaos becomes not a threat but a training ground for resilience.

Further Reading

In today’s cloud-native environment, your ability to break and fix your AWS EKS microservices with Chaos Monkey & FIS could be the difference between downtime and resilience.

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