Why you should consider Load Testing with K6 (Grafana)
Performance testing, JavaScript
Until recently, my focus had been on unit, integration, and end-to-end tests across various projects. However, a recent work challenge led us to assess our service’s stress capacity, preparing for a full launch of one of our services. It was during this exploration that my colleague and I discovered K6, a performance-testing framework.
Overview of K6
K6 is a handy JavaScript framework in the Grafana open-source family for load testing. Essentially, it lets you create scripts that act like real users interacting with your API. These scripts come with different options like virtual users (vus), durations, and more, making it easy to mimic various scenarios.
Now, apart from helping you set up different test scenarios, K6 goes the extra mile by generating customizable metrics. These metrics can provide you with a detailed overview of how your system is performing under different conditions.
Usage
Now, let’s see how to use this tool. I’ll use a signup API I created a while ago. This API is for user sign-up and is a basic Node.js Express application. With k6, I can easily write a script to mimic how well the signup process performs.
