Microsoft released the preview of its Azure Load Testing service on 30th November, 2021. Azure Load Testing is a fully managed Azure solution that will help quality assurance (QA) testers and developers optimize their app’s scalability and performance.
Load testing is a performance testing technique that involves placing significant requests on a website, database, network, or application to see how it performs — it basically determines how well a system copes with a large number of simultaneous users. Companies can set up various load tests to simulate various scenarios, such as seeing what happens if X amount of people try to checkout from their online store at the same time.
Checking out how an application works under stress
When an application is under load, performance issues are frequently unnoticed. Users of Azure Load Test will be able to monitor live updates of client and server-side metrics while the test is ongoing, as well as get insight into how their application behaves under stress. Users can compare test results across different load tests to discover behaviour changes over time, and Azure-specific insights can assist users understand how different load situations effect all components of their application.
“Great to Azure Load Testing come to public preview with JMeter support! Managing load testing infrastructure is hard, and with this, you can worry about your load test specifics and not on the infrastructure and consolidation of test results/telemetry,” tweeted Thiago Almeida, a principal program manager at Microsoft.
Building load testing into CI/CD Pipeline
Azure Load Testing is intended to assist customers in incorporating load testing into their continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows so that performance issues can be identified before they occur in production. Users can define a performance baseline and set unambiguous pass or fail criteria using the integrations with GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines to catch performance regressions on every build.
In the event of a certain error circumstance, Azure Load Testing will automatically abort an automated load test. This behaviour reduces the risk of failing tests and paying additional fees.
“Application performance and resiliency are more important than ever before. As more businesses and services move toward digitization, the impact of outages and downtimes in lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction grows. Azure Load Testing is a service that can help testers and developers who are taking on a larger role in validating app quality, performance, and scalability,” said Mandy Whaley, partner director of product, Azure Dev Tools.
Getting started with Azure Load Testing
Users can create an Azure Load Testing resource in the Azure portal and check out the preview documentation to get started with Azure Load Testing.
