One of the common challenges when doing performance testing is the difficulty of correlating the metrics of your application with your testing results. Having available QA, infrastructure, and application metrics together allows engineering teams to better understand the behavior of their systems during the testing, helping to detect and prevent potential issues in their applications.
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.
As you’re probably aware, C# is a modern, garbage collected language, which means you don’t have to take care of object disposal as you would in languages like C++. However, that doesn’t mean.NET engineers don’t face memory problems, such as memory leaks. In this post, we’ll walk you through the basics of memory leaks in.NET: what they are, how they occur, and why they matter.
When someone new joins the company, they're encouraged to do what is called a "Week of Testing" - taking k6 for a spin and presenting your findings to the rest of the team. This article will show you how you can make your test scripts more readable and maintainable. To do that, I'll test a demo application with a custom DSL. DSL is short for a Domain Specific Language, and in this case, it allowed me to write meaningful code specific to our business requirements.
You can find a collection of k6 scripts and build specification for Bamboo in this tutorial here.
Recently, k6 started supporting k6 extensions to extend k6 capabilities for other cases required by the community. The community has already built plenty of extensions. k6 extensions are written in Go, and many of them are reusing existing Go libraries. This makes k6 to be a versatile tool to test different protocols and adapt to multiple cases. This post is the third part of my series of articles testing various systems using k6: Let's look in this post how we test the popular Kafka project.
