JavaScript Powered Performance Testing Using k6

Using software development practices like Agile/DevOps/CI gives us the ability to instantly access the risk of a new release or change before it impacts our customers.

The goal is to catch unexpected behaviors introduced into the code base as soon as possible. The sooner you find or prevent bugs, the easier and cheaper they are to fix.

This goal has caused teams to shift towards automation testing to help them find issues sooner in the software development lifecycle. Many teams have made this transition with functional testing and are only now starting to include performance testing as well.

Because of this shift, load and performance testing responsibilities have also partially fallen into the laps of developers. But how can you lower the performance testing barriers to help get your developers involved in stress and load testing?
k6 is a developer-centric load and performance testing tool. You can use it to describe performance-based user journeys or scenarios and have k6 run them.

k6 runs tests with any number of users ramping up and down in any pattern that you desire to measure how well the target system can cope with the amount of traffic you’re throwing at it.