Load Testing Serverless Applications With Serverless Artillery

Load testing is an important part when you are designing any type of application, whether it is traditional EC2 based, container-based, or a complete serverless application.

Why is Load Testing important?

Load testing will help us to find the following:

• How fast is the system?
• How much load can the system handle?
• Under what conditions will the system fail?
• Determine our application’s capabilities by measuring its response time, throughput, CPU utilization, latency, etc. during average and heavy user load. This will eventually help in determining the infrastructure needs as the system scales upward.
• It gives us an opportunity to find strange behavior or surprises when we subject an application to an insane amount of load (stress testing). Strange behaviors include request timeouts, IO Exceptions, memory leaks, or any security issues.

Choosing a Load testing tool or framework

There are many great load testing frameworks available. Some of the leading tools are,

• Jmeter
• Locust
• Artillery.io