Microsoft Makes Azure Load Testing Generally Available

Microsoft has made its Azure Load Testing Service generally available to help developers optimize the performance, scalability and capacity of their applications.

Azure Load Testing is a managed load-testing service that enables developers to generate high-scale load, gain actionable insights, and ensure the resiliency of your applications and services regardless of where they’re hosted, said Mandy Whaley, Microsoft’s Partner Director of Product for Azure Dev Tools, in a blog post.

Do More with Less

When it comes to helping coders, Microsoft’s overall goal is to enable developers to do more with less effort and less cost whenever applicable. For instance, when performance, scalability, or resiliency issues are identified in production or even close to production they can be difficult and costly to resolve. With Azure Load Testing developers can catch issues closer to code authoring time as part of their developer workflows saving them time and money, Whaley said.

Azure Load Testing enables developers to pay only for what they need in terms of infrastructure and services. Developers also can optimize their infrastructure and ensure that their applications and services are resilient to spikes in customer traffic. You can plan for the customer traffic you expect and pay only for the services you need. Azure Load Testing also helps users to test for unplanned increases in load.

“As part of our quality shift-left initiatives, the Cloud Ecosystem Security teams were able to prevent multiple unique load-related bugs from reaching production by gating production builds using Azure Load Testing as part of our CI/CD pipeline,” the Microsoft Cloud Ecosystem Security engineering team, said in a statement. “The service teams have also combined the load from Azure Load Testing with fault injection scenarios from Azure Chaos Studio to replicate, root cause and prevent nonhappy path scenarios that are hard to catch using regular testing frameworks. Along with service resiliency validation, Azure Load Testing has helped uncover the bounds of the distributed system and saved us costs by eliminating unused resources and frameworks.”

Meanwhile, also in a statement, Microsoft’s Azure Synapse engineering team, said: “The Azure Synapse team uses Azure Load Testing to generate different levels of workloads from high concurrency to large input data sequential execution targeting Synapse SQL Serverless endpoints. With the flexibility of JMeter we can start/stop other services within a cluster that can inject different failures, thus truly testing the resiliency of our service.”

Potential Uses

Developers can use Azure Load Testing to:

• Optimize their infrastructure and ensure app resiliency – Customers validate their application and services to serve the customer traffic they are expecting, ensuring they only pay for what they need. Once customers have optimized their infrastructure, they test the resiliency of their applications and services to handle unexpected increases in load.
• Catch regressions – Customers can automate regression testing by running load tests in Azure Pipelines or GitHub Actions and compare test results across different load tests to understand behavior changes over time.
• Gather insights with client and service side metrics – Azure-specific insights help customers to understand how different load scenarios impact all the parts of their application and services. Azure Load Testing creates monitoring data using Azure Monitor to closely monitor real-world production app performance under load, through client and service-side telemetry.
• Enable advanced load testing scenarios – For more of these scenarios, customers create a JMeter-based load test, a popular open source load and performance tool. Customers who already have existing JMeter test scripts can reuse them to create load tests in Azure Load Testing.

Metrics, Monitoring and Availability

Moreover, Azure Load Testing collects detailed resource metrics to help you identify performance bottlenecks across your Azure application components. You can automate regression testing by running load tests as part of your CI/CD workflow.

Azure Load Testing also creates monitoring data using the Azure Monitor service, including application insights and container insights, to capture details from the Azure services.

Azure Load Testing is now available in 11 regions: Australia East, East Asia, East U.S., East U.S. 2, North Europe, South Central U.S., Sweden Central, U.K. South, West Europe, West U.S. 2, and West U.S. 3.