In this guide, we'll look at adding performance testing to your development workflow with Buddy and k6. k6 is an open-source load testing tool for testing the performance of APIs, microservices, and websites. Developers can use k6 to test a system's performance under a particular load to catch performance regressions or errors.
Can you believe that the holiday season is almost upon us? High time for an update from your trusted load testing provider!
Recently AWS made the new ARM processors for Lambda functions generally available. With that change Serverless functions now use Graviton2, said to offer better performance at lower cost. I built a sample API on AWS using API Gateway and Lambda, and I wrote two endpoints, one CPU-intensive (calculating Pi using Leibniz's formula), the other a typical data transfer endpoint (returning an arbitrary number of bytes). Two very different endpoints for my experiment.
k6 Cloud, our managed testing solution, supports Prometheus to store and correlate performance testing metrics within your observability stack since a while now. Announced at Grafana ObservabilityCON, we launched Prometheus support to k6 Open Source - our free, open, and extensible load testing tool. k6 OSS supports sending k6 metrics to multiple outputs such as InfluxDB, New Relic, StatsD, and more.
We’re excited to launch xk6-browser at Grafana ObservabilityCON today, an extension to k6 adding support for browser automation via the Chrome Devtools Protocol (CDP). k6 was built because we weren’t satisfied with the developer experience offered by existing load testing solutions. We believe in shifting performance testing, and with it observability, to the left.
