At the end of 2018, Microsoft stated that Visual Studio 2019 is the last version with load testing features. A few months later they formally announced that Azure load testing is closing down on March 31st, 2020. This announcement came as a bomb to the community. But for those who follow this market, the news was not a complete surprise.

In this tutorial, we will look into how to integrate performance testing with k6 in your TeamCity build setup. k6 is a free and open-source performance testing tool for testing the performance of APIs, microservices and websites. TeamCity is a continuous integration and delivery server built by JetBrains.

Throughout the years, there has been many attempts to devise a universal format for defining Web API specifications. The objective was (and still is) to help stakeholders of the system to work with those APIs, without having access to the source code. Each new "universal" format came with the promise of being ubiquitous and all-encompassing, but eventually faded away due to various reasons, like OData and WSDL.

There are two different categories of tools in the load testing ecosystem. The first category is called non-scriptable tools and are usually used for load testing either a single endpoint or a set of endpoints. These tools usually generate load using a constant rate, which is measured in requests per unit of time, usually seconds. These non-scriptable tools don't apply any logic to the load testing process, other than the generation of load.

It has been almost three years since we first published our first comparison & benchmark articles that have become very popular, and we thought an update seemed overdue as some tools have changed a lot in the past couple of years. For this update, we decided to put everything into one huge article - making it more of a guide for those trying to choose a tool.