Microsoft Azure Load Testing is now generally available – AI Tech News

This blog was co-authored by Ashish Shah, Partner Director of Engineering, Azure Developer Experience.

We are announcing the general availability of Azure Load Testing. Azure load test is a fully managed load testing service that allows you to generate large-scale load, gain actionable insights, and ensure the resiliency of your applications and services no matter where they are hosted. Developers, testers, and engineering teams can use it to optimize application performance, scalability, or capacity.

start with Azure load test now, quickly creating a load test for your web application using a URL. If you already have load testing using JMeter, you can easily start with reuse of existing Apache JMeter test scripts.

Integrate resiliency testing into developer workflows

Our goal at Microsoft is to help developers do more with less effort. When performance, scalability, or resiliency issues are identified in production or even near production, they can be extremely difficult and costly to resolve. With Azure Load Testing, developers can catch issues closer to the time of code creation as part of their development workflows, saving them valuable time and energy.

“As part of our quality shift left initiatives, cloud ecosystem security teams were able to prevent several unique load-related bugs from reaching production by blocking production builds using Azure Load Testing as part of our CI/CD pipeline. Service teams also combined Azure Load Testing load with Azure Chaos Studio fault injection scenarios to replicate, provoke, and prevent unhappy path scenarios that are difficult to detect using frameworks. regular testing. Along with validating service resiliency, Azure Load Testing helped uncover the limitations of the distributed system and saved us costs by eliminating unused resources and infrastructure.”—Microsoft Cloud Ecosystem Security Engineering Team

“The Azure Synapse team uses Azure Load Testing to generate different levels of workloads, from high concurrency to sequential execution of large input data targeting Synapse SQL Serverless endpoints. Thanks to the flexibility of JMeter, we can start/stop other services within a cluster which can inject different failures, thus truly testing the resilience of our service.”—Microsoft Azure Synapse Engineering Team

Pay only what you need

Optimize your infrastructure while ensuring that your application and services withstand large spikes in customer traffic. Leverage Azure Load Testing to optimize your infrastructure before production, planning the client traffic you expect, paying only for what you need. Then leverage Azure Load Testing to test for unplanned load increases.

Figure 1: Easily scale load in Azure Load Testing to verify the resiliency of your applications and services.

Regression testing

For Azure-based applications, Azure Load Testing collects detailed resource metrics to help identify performance bottlenecks on the components of your Azure application. You can automate regression testing by running load tests as part of your continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) workflow.

Figure 2: Integrate load testing into your developer workflow with pass/fail criteria.

Azure specific information can help you understand the impact of different load scenarios on all parts of your application, and you can compare test results through different load tests to understand changes in behavior over time.

Azure Load Testing creates monitoring data using Azure Monitor, including Application Insights and Container Insights, to capture details of Azure services. Depending on the type of service, different metrics are available. For example, the number of database reads, type of HTTP responses, or container resource consumption. Client-side and server-side metrics are available in the Azure Load Testing dashboard.

Figure 3: Get insights into the performance of Azure client-side and service-side metrics with Azure Load Testing.

Enable advanced load test scenarios

For more advanced load testing scenarios, you can create load test based on JMeter, a popular open-source load and performance tool. For example, your test plan might consist of multiple application requests or data and parameter inputs to make testing more dynamic. And if you already have existing JMeter test scripts you can reuse them to create load tests with Azure Load Testing.

Figure 4: Overview of Azure load testing architecture.

What has changed since the preview?

Since we launched Azure Load Testing, we have enabled several new abilities based on customer feedback.

Quick test creation

Azure SDK load testing libraries

JMeter Capabilities

Authentication, user-managed identities, and customer-managed keys

Additional Metrics

• Additional client-side metrics for pass/fail criteria. Azure Load Testing lets you take advantage of pass/fail criteria metrics, including additional client-side metrics of requests per second and latency.
• View load engine metrics. Ability to view engine health metrics to understand test engine performance during execution, providing confidence in test results and improving test setup.

Compliance and regional availability

• Azure Load Testing is HITRUST certified.
• Regional availability of Azure load testing. Azure Load Testing is now available in 11 regions; Australia East, East Asia, East US, East US2, Northern Europe, South Central US, Central Sweden, Southern UK, Western Europe, West US2 and West US3.

Get started with Azure load testing

You can start with Azure load test by creating an Azure Load Testing resource in the Azure portal. Learn about Azure load testing Documentation and create your first load test.

Learn more about pricing details on the Azure Load Testing pricing page.

Watch the new DevOps Lab episode, “What’s new in Azure Load Testing?“

Azure load testing on DevOps Lab

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Figure 5: What’s New in Azure Load Testing with April Edwards and Nikita Nallamothu.

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