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How to Easily Load Test Serverless Apps With Postman and AWS
Load testing should take a couple of days, not a couple of weeks. We have the tools available at our fingertips…for free
When you mention load testing to a software engineer, nine times out of 10 you see a slight wince in their face. Why? Because historically, load tests have been painful.
Building automated test scripts is tedious, developers didn’t think about performance at scale during the initial build, and nobody knows how to address the issues that crop up as a result.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Necessary disaster, but a mess nonetheless.
Enter serverless. If you’ve built your app using FaaS (Functions as a Service), you’re in luck. You likely already know about the numerous benefits of AWS Lambda, but you can add easy to load test on there now too.
A core tenet behind serverless apps is to be API first, which means you are able to fully exercise the system via endpoints. All you need in order to load test is just a way to chain these requests together to build your test scripts.
Once you have your test scripts, you need a tool that can run them at scale. Our good friends at AWS have provided us with a tool that does just that.
Lastly, you need to be able to monitor the system health while the load test is running. Guess what? AWS has us covered on that too.
Use Postman to Build Your Test Scripts
Postman is going to act as your script builder. You should have a set of business processes that you want to see perform under load, and Postman is going to help orchestrate that.
If you already use Postman and have collections built that run through business processes — great! You can use those without any additional setup. If you do not, I would…
