Performance Testing with StormForge – What It Is and Why You Need It

The last couple of years has seen a mass migration from a monolithic to a microservice-based architecture. And it seems that organizations believe this movement has somewhat diminished the need for performance testing. As a result, performance testing is usually seen as an afterthought that begins after functional testing is completed. 

Performance testing in the cloud helps scale the application as a whole and not just the resources. It enables you to understand the performance-related characteristics of your application infrastructure. It is a test of how reliable an application would be before it is deployed.

StormForge brings together cloud-native performance testing and machine learning-powered optimization to help improve Kubernetes performance while saving on costs. This approach elevates performance optimization to make it a proactive and continuous function rather than a reactive one. This article focuses on the performance testing aspect of StormForge. 

What is performance testing?

Performance testing is a type of non-functional software testing that helps figure out how the speed, scalability, and stability of an application will act under a given workload. It is pivotal in understanding and predicting software reliability. Performance testing helps detect compute and memory bottlenecks within an application. 

What is performance testing with StormForge? 

StormForge performance testing is an easy-to-use, cloud-based solution for understanding the behavior of your application. You can create test cases quickly and scale to a multitude of requests and concurrent users per second. It also provides several capabilities like the open workload model that ensures the testing reflects real-world scenarios. 

With performance testing, you can simulate your own load test scenarios. You can use StormForge performance testing to understand how your application performs under your recorded production load. You can see how your application responds to the tests with precise detailing. 

The metrics you choose to measure serve as the baseline for experiments. An experiment will consist of multiple trials that will enable you to use machine learning and zero in on the best set of parameters among a multitude of possible combinations. As the experiment progresses, StormForge will analyze and learn your application’s parameters to completely optimize for the metrics you specify. When the experiments are done, you will have a set of optimal application configurations that can best balance your performance goals.

StormForge’s performance testing helps convert HAR (HTTP ARchive) files to test cases. It helps integrate performance testing right into your CI/CD workflow. StormForge uses an open source Command-line interface (CLI) for complete control and to enable automation. It has an easy-to-use DSL tool that enables you to express complex test cases. 

Optimization, however, is not a one-time thing as your environment is constantly evolving. That’s why organizations tend to integrate StormForge into Kubernetes workloads. StormForge helps run performance tests automatically before a deployment. If your performance threshold is breached, you can immediately start a new experiment to re-optimize your application. 

Types of performance testing

1. Load and stress testing

Load testing is when you introduce a normal workload into a system that is under test and observe it. This helps determine general system behavior and verify the quality criteria. 

Stress testing is essentially a glorified form of load testing where an abnormal or greater-than-expected workload is introduced into the system to see how it behaves under actual stress. This helps understand how a system performs and breaks under stressful situations. It also helps gauge where a system begins to breach its non-functional requirements. 

2. Scalability testing 

With scalability testing, you can run a series of stress tests and steadily increase the system’s resources to gauge if your system can translate this into additional capacity. This helps understand how far a system can and will scale, thus ensuring you make an informed decision. Scalability testing, essentially, helps you understand how well your application can grow.

3. Configuration testing 

Configuration testing focuses on changes that occur in the performance of a system when any configuration is modified. The changes can be quantized regardless of being positive or negative. Configurations can be anything from your environment to the dependencies of your software. 

StormForge’s performance testing has a list of configuration options to choose from:

• Autoscaling 
• Service usage optimization (ELB pre-warning)
• Instant types selection
• Throughput provisioning (DynamoDB, EBS IOPS) 

Why do you need it? 

Performance testing can help eliminate the guesswork from your resource provisioning. With performance testing, there is no requirement for guessing the right infrastructure types and settings as you would know them before release. StormForge performance testing will help you see the improvement compared to the baseline for the metrics that you care about in a recommended trial. This is significant in terms of decreasing real cloud costs and increasing improvements to the user experience. It also helps save time when compared to a trial and error approach.

StormForge performance testing also helps identify high-risk configurations that might pass a unit test but are unstable and would likely fail in production, helping you avoid costly downtime. 

StormForge helps you dramatically improve the performance, stability, and efficiency of your Kubernetes applications. It establishes and ensures a foundation for Kubernetes success, letting you focus on innovating, not configuring and tuning your environment. 

Conclusion

We have established that performance testing is crucial to understanding a system and its infrastructure. And performance testing helps understand your system better by executing a plethora of tests. Executing these tests coherently and effectively can get quite difficult. StormForge stands out when it comes to this as it is a unique solution that combines cloud-native performance testing with machine learning-powered optimization. As the cloud is complex, scalable, and here to stay, the future of StormForge’s performance testing seems promising. A solution like StormForge is just what you need to improve application reliability, optimize performance, and save on Kubernetes cloud costs – all at the same time.

If you have questions related to this topic, feel free to book a meeting with one of our solutions experts, mail to sales@amazic.com.