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How We Work at k6 - Remote and 8-week Work Cycles

August 7, I joined the Office Hours our Developer Relations team runs on a weekly basis, to talk about how we work at k6. We are growing rapidly, and are a little unconventional in how we organize ourselves, so I thought it would be a good idea to share in more detail how we build and ship software, being a remote-only company.

How to Perform Load Testing with k6 using Google Cloud Build

In this tutorial, we will look into how to integrate performance testing in your development process with Google Cloud Build and k6. k6 is an open-source load testing tool for testing the performance of APIs, microservices, and websites. Developers use k6 to test a system's performance under a particular load to catch performance regressions or errors.

Error Economics - How to avoid breaking the budget

At SLOConf 2021 I talked about how we may use error budgets to add pass/fail criterias to reliability tests we run as part of our CI pipelines. As Site Reliability Engineers, one of our primary goals is to reduce manual labor, or toil, to a minimum while at the same time keeping the systems we manage as reliable and available as possible. To be able to do this in a safe way, it's really important that we're able to easily inspect the state of the system.

k6 Load Testing Debugging Using a Web Proxy

One of the more challenging aspects of load testing happens very early on: getting your scripts working. When you run your scripts, you may observe unexpected error status codes (typically in the 4xx-5xx status code range). Other times, you'll run your script and see it receive the expected responses (usually HTTP 200), yet the "thing" your script is meant to create simply doesn't show up anywhere, like on the database or as a record on the site. You start wondering: why on earth is that?

Benchmarking Redis with k6

Previously, I have covered an article on Load Testing SQL Databases with k6 . For your information, from k6 version 0.29.0 onwards, you can write a k6 Go extension and build your own k6 binaries. This comes in handy as you can use a single framework for load testing different protocols, such as ZMTQ, SQL, Avro, MLLP, etc. In this series of k6 extensions, let’s benchmark Redis now.

Load Testing SQL Databases with k6

This short tutorial shows how to run a k6 test for load testing a database. In performance testing, we often trigger load tests that simulate realistic user flows, particularly those that are most commonly seen in production. This type of acceptance testing usually interacts with various parts of our infrastructure: web servers, microservices, databases, etc. But what if you want to test the performance or scalability of an infrastructure resource in isolation?

k6 v0.33.0 released

It's once again the end of a release cycle for us here at k6, and this time we're happy to announce that k6 v0.33.0 is here! 🎉 The v0.33.0 release is a small one, mainly containing a bunch of minor bugfixes and enhancements, but is also laying the groundwork for some major new features like the upcoming k6/execution API in k6 v0.34.0. To read the full release notes, see the GitHub Release for v0.33.0.

Our exciting next step - k6 is now part of Grafana Labs!

It's been a few weeks since Raj Dutt, Grafana Labs CEO and Co-Founder, announced the k6 acquisition during the closing session of GrafanaCONline 2021. You can learn more by reading our joint press release, or by watching the recording of the k6 Office Hours I joined the day after the announcement. With this blog I would like to share my excitement and my perspective. The acquisition marks a milestone for the k6 team, our customers, and the k6 community.