Is it possible to simulate Zone Outage?

Question

Hi support,

we implemented a zone redundant architecture:

1LB -> 2 SUBNETS -> 2 VM -> n Disks..

We would like to simulate zone outage, to test service resiliency

How can we do that?

Thank you

Regards

Davide Moroni

Answer 1

Hi Davide,

Have you tried shutting down a VM in one of the Availability Zones? This could be on way to simulate a VM outage in one of your zones and see if the other zone picks up the traffic.

You can also take other pieces of your setup a part to simulate how traffic would flow. From experience, it may take 5 or so minutes for the switch to happen. This should help you get a better observation of how it works.

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Answer 2

Hello, @Davide Moroni !

How do I simulate a zone outage?

There are a couple of different approaches to this. The first, as Dillon Silzer mentioned, is to manually turn off the service that you want to simulate an outage for. There are examples of this in the official documentation and blogs for different services.

The second approach would be to utilize a dedicated service like Azure Chaos Studio to test resilience against real-world incidents, like outages or high CPU utilization on virtual machines (VMs). Given that you want to test the resiliency of the entire architecture, this is likely going to be the most organized and documented approach as you can use different targets and capabilities:

• What is Azure Chaos Studio?
• Quickstart: Create and run a chaos experiment by using Azure Chaos Studio
• Faults and actions in Azure Chaos Studio

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