Mastering Service Mesh

Fault injection

The sidecar proxy provides a list of failure recovery network mechanisms for all the services being managed by Istio. As good practice, operators should not skip end-to-end service failure testing for the entire application. You may encounter restrictive timeouts of individual components when you test for overall failure recovery. Let's understand this with an example—you introduce 10 seconds of fault injection for end-to-end testing for a full life cycle of a transaction. However, you notice a particular intermediate service failure due to its own timeout of 6 seconds. You won't be able to notice the intermediate service failure without the fault injection feature.

To prevent such matters, Istio provides transparent fault ...