Load testing your applications using Azure Load Testing, JMeter and GitHub Actions
Dominique St-Amand shares an introduction on JMeter concepts and goes on to create a basic test plan to load test a sample application and run it through a GitHub Action workflow.
I’ve been working with more customers that are starting to take testing (unit, integration, end to end and load testing) more seriously. You may ask, “Dom, really? I thought testing was trivial”. Unfortunately not. As we’re entering an era where businesses are producing software like never before, relatively speaking, these businesses are not software companies. They are seeking to prioritize the speedy creation of business value while disregarding the importance of testing. Development teams, most often than not, are under pressure when the applications they develop do not perform the way they intended it to work, after being released. Testing is not engrained within their DNA. If it would have been, the extra stress and anxiety associated with debugging the problems post release would be mitigated.
Testing is a critical part of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Load testing, unfortunately, is a type of testing that not many are aware of. What is the maximum number of users that the application or system can handle before performance is impacted? How does the application or system behave under peak loads and sustained loads? What are the areas of the application or system that are most impacted by increased load? Those questions are only the start of a conversation which can be answered when doing load testing.
From experience, many are not aware of load testing because many businesses are not equipped to perform these types of tests. Development teams do not have the proper tools to simulate load. This is why I’m really excited that Azure introduced the Azure Load Testing service. Azure Load Testing is a fully managed load-testing service that enables you to generate high-scale load. The service simulates traffic for your applications, regardless of where they’re hosted.
The Azure Load Testing service comes with a quick test screen when using the UI. In this post, we will be load testing using Azure Load Testing JMeter capability. Apache JMeter is a Java application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. JMeter allows us to configure much more advanced load testing scenarios. One great advantage of using the service is the fact that Azure Load Testing service allows us to have a maximum of, as of the time of writing, 45 engines running in parallel. Their recommendation is to have 250 threads per engine (think of threads as virtual users), however this is actually a soft limit – you can use the engine health metrics to monitor the load on the instances and adjust the number of threads accordingly. This means that you can have a multitude of simultaneous users on your application at one time. Quite difficult to achieve unless you have real traffic!
To get started, I will give a light introduction on the JMeter concepts and go on by creating a basic test plan to load test a sample application I’ve put together. I will then show you how to run this test through a GitHub Action workflow. This flow and setup can help you in your regression testing.
Continue reading Dominique’s post here.
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