I am a software developer for quite a while now and I found that one aspect that is often neglected is load testing. As developers, we are usually first and foremost interested to “make it work”. Sure, we will come up with all the well-known design patterns that have proved themselves efficient countless times. We think that everything will work just fine and most often than not, it does. However, you should always know how your application will behave under stress. And that is why you need Load and/or stress testing. I witnessed this situation where a performance expert comes into play and run some one-time Jmeter scripts on your application to evaluate whether or not it is performing well.

Well, In a cloud world, let me tell you that shouldn’t fly anymore. You need self-sufficient teams that can take care of every aspect of the application. Needless to say that the performance aspect should be considered from the beginning. Anyone wants to use applications that are fastly responding, no matter the load it is under. And who better than the development team to take care of this. They know the application best, it’s just so hard to find an attractive enough tool to get a developer engaged. That’s where K6 revealed himself as a great option:

• Open-source
• Runs on a local environment
• Everything as code
• Automation
• Results visualization
• CLI tool

#k6 #load-testing #apis