Load testing with K6

One of the more performant solutions for load testing.

More information

A part of my Master's thesis was not only deploying a web application, but also load testing it across different container orchestrators, to see how well it performs and whether the container orchestrator deployments have succeeded properly.

What I did

For this, I utilized the nice K6 tool. I've had some former experience with automated testing, including things like using Selenium, but when you want to do performance tests, you need to think about how you'll generate a large amount of valid (or invalid) requests in a short amount of time, with ample parallelization.

What I learnt

K6s was a great solution for this, because it let me write my test code in JavaScript, even if something like the error output wasn't as nice as in some other JS runtimes. Regardless, it served me nicely, even if any tests written in it would become somewhat unrealistic: if you wanted to simulate how a browser would actually interact with a page, such as loading a lot of images and CSS, you'd probably want something like Selenium, but better optimized.