Hands-On Microservices with Kubernetes

Injecting faults for testing

The failure handling mechanisms of Istio don't magically fix errors. Automatic retries can automatically address intermittent failures, but some failures need to be handled by the application or even a human operator. In fact, the misconfiguration of Istio failure handling can itself cause failures (for example, configuring timeouts that are too short). Testing how the system behaves in the presence of failures can be done by artificially injecting faults. There are two types of faults that Istio can inject: aborts and delays. You can configure fault injection at the virtual service level.

Here is an example of where a delay of 5 seconds is added to 10% of all requests to the link-manager service in order to simulate ...