When it comes to building and deploying applications, one increasingly popular approach these days is to use microservices in Kubernetes. It provides an easy way to collaborate across organizational boundaries and is a great way to scale. However, it comes with many operational challenges. One big issue is that it’s difficult to test the microservices in real-life scenarios before letting production traffic reach them. But there are ways to get around it.

Have you ever wanted to load test an application behind a corporate firewall? If so, you probably ran into a few issues. Load testing on the cloud can be the most cost-effective way to run a load test, but not if the application isn't publicly accessible. Recently, we released a new feature for k6 Cloud that allows you to run load tests on your own private load zones. But first, does it really matter where load is generated from?

In last week's office hours, Nicole and Paul sat down with engineering manager Marko Pandurovic to discuss the ever-evolving k6 backend. All systems turn more complex with time, and the k6 backend is no exception.

A k6 load test can generate a ton of data. Without a way to organize the data, you'll struggle to analyze test results. Fortunately, there are many ways to turn results into data-rich visualizations.

Software development is entirely different today than it was a few years ago. Back then, we usually had a big monolith running on our own hardware. We mainly did performance tests to see if the hardware resources were sufficient to handle the load. Today, we develop software in a distributed environment with multiple services which may even run on different cloud platforms. With performance testing, we try to identify performance and resilience issues in these kinds of environments.

You can find a collection of k6 scripts and GitHub workflows referenced in this tutorial here. In this tutorial, we will look into how to integrate performance testing in your development process with GitHub Actions and k6. For a video tutorial 🎥 , check out the following tutorial on YouTube. k6 is an open-source load testing tool for testing the performance of APIs, microservices, and websites.

At k6 we regularly get a request to support another programming language in addition to JavaScript. Go developers would like to write test scripts in Go, Java developers migrating from jMeter would like to write tests in Java. We have evaluated these requests and discussed in detail internally if this is a good direction for the k6 tool. Ultimately we have decided against supporting more programming languages for scripting. Below is our reasoning for this decision.

Grafana k6 is our open source tool to help you ship reliable applications by doing performance testing in a modern and developer-friendly way. Performance testing is still unknown to many, but it is not a new topic. In fact, performance testing courses are everywhere — even at colleges and universities. One of our passions is to educate others on the best practices of performance testing, working together with the k6 community.

​ TimescaleDB is a open-source database that extends PostgreSQL for better storage, processing, and analysis of time-series data at scale. If you want to know more about TimescaleDB, I recommend you look at the official documentation. k6 is an open-source and extensible load testing tool that generates the results of the testing (k6 metrics) as time-series data. k6 can send metrics to various formats and systems.

The first month of the year draws to an end. High time for an update from your trusted load testing provider!