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The 5-Step Checklist for Serverless Load Testing
3. Build a monitoring dashboard
Serverless is great. It takes many worries out of your hands and puts them into the hands of your cloud provider, like AWS.
Things like scalability, reliability, and server maintenance go right out the door when it comes to your responsibilities. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have responsibilities of your own.
The purpose of a load test is to see if your application can handle expected (plus a little more) traffic. But that’s what the whole serverless scalability premise is, right? This shouldn’t be your problem?
Not quite.
You still have the responsibility of making sure you string services together correctly and have provided your endpoints with proper throttling mechanisms.
A serverless load test is not meant to test if your cloud vendor can scale, but rather if you’ve designed software intended to scale.
With this in mind, there are several things you need to do before you hit the “Go” button on that load test.
1. Identify Primary Business Workflows
When running a load test, you want to make sure the actions that will be performed 80% of the time will scale the best. In an ideal world we could load test everything, but in a pragmatic world we need to test the majority use cases.
If you have a shopping cart app, your primary use cases will be adding items to your cart, removing items from your cart, and checking out. There are many other things you can do in a shopping app, but 80% of the time, your users will be doing one of those three actions.
Hopefully by the time you’ve decided to run load tests, you have proactive monitoring in place. This means you have tests that run fake data through your system at regular intervals in order to catch problems before your customers see them.
There are many tools you can use for proactive monitoring:
In my previous post about load tests, I spoke about using the AWS distributed load testing tool with Postman to run load tests. This…
