Load testing is an essential part of application lifecycle ensuring the scalability, reliability and performance of your application. It’s common for performance issues in applications to go unnoticed until an application is subjected to high levels of usage. The demand for faster application and reduced latency makes organisation look for solutions that meet their demands. One such cloud based solution is Azure Load testing. This was released as a service by Microsoft on February 1 2023. Azure load testing service collects client side metrics like request time, response time, number of virtual users, request per second and server side metrics on azure components and creates a detailed view on application performance. When setting up the testing environment, we can establish criteria for test failures that can help identify performance or stability issues in the application at an initial development phase. This can help prevent such issues from going unnoticed and becoming more challenging to address later on. This service offers data security with data and test results not leaving the deployment region in azure. Scripts stored in the service are automatically encrypted by service managed keys.
The major benefits of Azure Load testing includes:
1. Scalability: Azure completely abstracts the infrastructure requirement of the organisation and provides and secure and scaleable solution. It is easy to scale the services up and down based on the testing needs of the organisation. The applications can be tested with huge number of concurrent users to find performance bottlenecks.
2. Easy to use: Azure load testing is easy to use, You can create test without prior knowledge of load testing scripts, and even upload your existing JMeter scripts since the service is based on Apache JMeter framework. It is capable of running test cases in both public cloud as well as on premise.
3. Cost-effective: Azure has a free tier and a pay as you use model, that is more cost-effective compared to traditional load testing solutions, organisation can focus on application resiliency avoiding headaches of managing expensive software and hardware.
4. Comprehensive Metrics: Azure Load testing give you and extensive and detailed view on your application performance when subjected to heavy load.
5. Integration with CICD pipelines: You can integrate the Azure Load testing with your CICD pipelines and get hold of insights using automated load testing.
Azure Load testing is a powerful service that organisations can leverage to optimize the performance of deployed application and services. This can be considered as an effective and efficient tool that should be a part of application development and deployment strategy.
