Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Azure Load Testing, a fully-managed load-testing service allowing customers to test the resiliency of their applications regardless of where they are hosted.

In December 2021, the company released a preview of the service as a successor to their Azure DevOps cloud-based load testing service and Visual Studio 2019 load testing capabilities, which are no longer supported. 

Since the preview, Microsoft has enabled several capabilities, such as additional metrics for pass/fail criteria, support for authenticating with client certificates, support for user-specified JMeter properties, load engine metrics views, and private endpoint testing based on customer feedback. 

The Azure Load Testing service allows users to generate high-scale loads without managing complex infrastructure. It integrates with Azure Monitor, including Application insights and Container insights, to capture metrics from the Azure services. As a result, users can leverage the service for use cases such as:

• Optimize infrastructure before production by planning for the expected traffic and unplanned increase in loads.
• For Azure-based applications, the service collects detailed resource metrics to help identify performance bottlenecks across your Azure application components.
• Automate regression testing by running load tests as part of your continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflow.
• Leveraging JMeter, a popular open-source load and performance tool, by creating a JMeter-based load test.

Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-load-testing-is-now-generally-available/

Furthermore, with the GA release, Microsoft also released several Azure SDK Load Testing libraries for .NET, Java, JavaScript, and Python programming languages.

Mandy Whaley, partner director of product, Azure Dev Tools, at Microsoft, told InfoQ:

I’m thrilled that Azure Load Testing is now generally available. Every company and developer can use it to ensure their apps and services are responsive and resilient in real-world conditions.

In addition, she added:

Developers can use load testing early in the development process to make sure they’re picking the right tier of cloud resources for their apps so cloud investments match traffic, and they only pay for the resources they need. We’re seeing a range of customer adoption from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Azure Load Testing is scalable enough for the biggest team and accessible enough for smaller organizations and individuals.

Currently, Azure Load Testing is available in 11 regions, and the pricing details are available on the pricing page. In addition, more information about Azure Load Testing is available on the documentation landing page.