When databases fail and network paths falter, you still need your mission-critical cloud services to stay online. Yet guaranteeing high availability has become increasingly difficult because of the complexity of modern distributed systems. To help you maintain availability and reliability during adverse events, we’re announcing Google Cloud Fault Injection Testing (FIT) in preview. FIT is designed to help developers and architects automate failure testing to ensure predictable behavior during disruptions.
By deliberately introducing faults into your environment, you can verify your safety mechanisms before an actual outage impacts your customers. Unlike in self-hosted data centers, cloud applications offer less direct access to underlying infrastructure to facilitate failover testing. Without native tools to prove your application can survive a failure, you risk a critical gap in your reliability strategy that exposes you to several risks: Damaged trust and reputation : Frequent failures or poor performance lead to customer dissatisfaction and long-term damage to your brand's image.
Compliance and regulatory penalties : For many industries, particularly financial institutions, failing to prove disaster recovery capabilities can lead to non-compliance, audits, and fines. Migration delays : Large-scale migrations often stop when teams cannot verify that critical applications will remain stable during a zone failure. FIT allows you to run experiments by creating experiment templates. These templates act as blueprints, defining the specific fault to be injected and the resources that will be targeted for the experiment.
In this public preview, you can test two primary failure scenarios: Failover Cloud SQL : This fault triggers a failover of a high availability Cloud SQL instance from the primary zone to a standby zone. Degrade application traffic : This allows you to selectively add latency and HTTP error codes through a Layer 7 load balancer. Before any fault is injected, Cloud FIT performs an automated dry run. This read-only simulation checks your permissions and provides an up-to-date list of every resource that will be affected. Once you verify the scope, you can manually start the injection.