What The Hack - Azure Load Testing

Introduction

Azure Load Testing Service (Preview) enables developers and testers to generate high-scale load that reveal actionable insights into app performance, scalability, capacity - and ultimately resiliency - with a fully managed service.

Learning Objectives

This hack is designed to introduce you to Azure Load Testing and guide you through a series of hands-on challenges to accomplish the following:

• Leverage a cloud-based load testing service with high fidelity support for JMeter and new/existing JMeter scripts
• Build a comprehensive view of curated client and server metrics with actionable insights into app performance
• Integrate with CI/CD workflows for automated, collaborative load-testing
• Perform load testing in conjunction with Azure Chaos Studio to ensure resiliency during an application/service/region degradation or failure

Challenges

• Challenge 00: Prerequisites - Ready, Set, GO!
  • Prepare your workstation to work with Azure.
• Challenge 01: Develop a Load Testing Strategy
  • How to develop a load testing strategy for your application
• Challenge 02: Create a Load Testing Script
  • Deploy a sample application and create JMeter scripts to support your load testing strategy
• Challenge 03: Create Azure Load Testing Service and Establish Baselines
  • Create Azure Load Testing Service and learn techniques on how to establish baselines for your application
• Challenge 04: Enable Automated Load Testing (CI/CD)
  • Incorporating load testing into your CI/CD Pipeline
• Challenge 05: Identify & Remediate Bottlenecks
  • Reviewing load test results and identifying bottlenecks
• Challenge 06: Stress Testing
  • How to perform stress tests and observing your application behavior
• Challenge 07: Load Testing With Chaos Experiment (Resilience Testing)
  • Incorporating load testing and chaos experiments together

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with the fundamentals of load testing
• Azure subscription for creating the Load Testing service and running the sample application
• GitHub or Azure DevOps to automate load testing in your CI/CD pipelines
• Apache JMeter installed on your local machine or in a VM to create your load testing script
• Azure Cloud Shell or Azure CLI

Contributors

• Kevin M. Gates
• Andy Huang