As holiday season winds down, we can reflect on the reverse load test that we did to make sure our customers could prepare for their own holiday traffic. What’s a reverse load test? OK, it's a term we just made up. But it started like any load test, with two systems: the load generator and the system under test (SUT). The focus of our test, however, was inverted. In normal load tests, testers really care only about how the SUT performs—that’s the point of the test.

At k6, we get frequent requests to compare k6 vs. LoadRunner, and since I am an experienced user with LoadRunner (even certified), I will try to put both tools head to head. But comparing these tools is difficult as their components do not match 1:1. Each is a robust ecosystem with different parts, some doing multiple things that make straight comparisons more complicated. And on top of that, we constantly get new features that match up with many other components.

This post explains how to get started with xk6-browser, a k6 extension that adds browser-level APIs to interact with browsers and collect web performance metrics as part of your k6 tests.

I’m a big fan of K6, it makes writing performance tests quick and easy. In fact I wrote about it previously on my blog in a post titled Performance testing APIs in pipelines? K6 makes it simple! What I didn’t mention in that post was how to lint K6. Now you might be thinking, K6 tests are written in JavaScript, how hard can it be to lint? The problem is that although we write K6 tests in JavaScript, K6 itself is written in GoLang, an so we run into issues with Linting when importing K6.

This post presents how xk6-disruptor, a k6 extension for fault injection, can be used to improve the reliability of applications by “shifting left” chaos testing.

Hi there, Here at k6, we’re constantly shipping new features to help our users get the most out of k6. In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of all the k6 and k6 Cloud news, updates, and improvements you should know about.

With version 0.41, k6 has changed how it handles, stores, and aggregates the data it collects in the context of a load test. Most users probably won't notice any immediate difference. Yet, we expect these changes will empower us to make k6 more performant and easier to integrate into the larger observability ecosystem.

This tutorial will demonstrate Keptn, a CNCF Incubator Project’s integration with k6. Keptn is a cloud-native application delivery and operations platform. We will use the Job Executor Service to execute k6 performance testing in a Keptn project. We'll start with running a k6 script and how the logs look. And then we'll modify the k6 script to see the behavior when it fails.

At ObservabilityCON, we announced our first step towards launching a native integration between Grafana k6 load testing and Grafana Tempo tracing (k6 x Tempo) in Grafana Cloud. We created k6 x Tempo to help dev, testing, and operation teams analyze their performance test results more effectively and proactively improve the reliability of their business-critical applications.

The growth of a code base is unpredictable. To account for this uncertainty, we call on everything we've learnt in the last x years about how to scale an application effectively: adopting naming conventions, creating file and folder structures, using the latest patterns, and producing sensible abstractions. These actions add up over time. Eventually, you'll mentally high-five your past self for having taken the time to do them ✋.