Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Measuring throughput and latency is a critical step in load testing software to ensure application performance and stability. In this article, we’ll discuss essential considerations before beginning performance testing and provide a detailed, step-by-step guide on leveraging production traffic replication in Kubernetes. This approach helps you accurately determine your software’s maximum throughput during performance testing.

Postman is highly popular in the testing tools space for verifying API requests. While its use for general API testing is widely adopted, conducting load testing with Postman is not as straightforward. In this post, we assume that you have some experience working with Postman and are familiar with the fundamentals of creating and sending requests. If you’re new to Postman, there are numerous resources available in the Postman Learning Center.

As developers, one of the most important things we can consider when designing and building applications is the ability to know if our application is running in an ideal operating condition, or said another way: the ability to know whether or not your application is healthy. This is particularly important when deploying your application to Kubernetes. Kubernetes has the concept of container probes that, when used, can help ensure the health and availability of your application.

At some point, your development team may be considering implementing load testing (also known as stress testing) as part of your software testing process. Load testing validates that your web app is able to withstand a large number of simultaneous users, decreasing the chance that any traffic spikes will bring down your services once deployed. These stress tests can be highly granular, giving you the opportunity to test run virtually unlimited strategies before they are set into the wild.

Transactions-per-Second (TPS) is a valuable metric for evaluating system performance and is particularly relevant for engineers overseeing Kubernetes environments.TPS, alongside average response time, provides critical insights into system performance during load testing. This post covers two approaches to calculating TPS; a manual approach applicable in all environments, and an automatic Kubernetes-specific solution using production traffic replication.

What do good tests look like, and do you even need a Golang testing framework? It’s a loaded question with an open answer. Not only do tests help ensure that your code will work as intended, but good tests can also serve as documentation for your codebase, making it easier to update and maintain in the future, while accelerating and streamlining your software development process. In this article, we outline 6 Golang testing frameworks for every type of test.