Performance testing with Grafana K6

How many concurrent users can does your application handle? Or your platform infrastructure? What if they try uploading enormous files? Does your application reply fast enough? Does load balancing and scaling work and respond quickly when your application is flooded with requests from users checking their tax return, buying ice cream on the 17th of May, or vote for their favorite Eurovision contestant?

Downtime or users experiencing a slow application at a critical point in time can lead to both financial and reputational loss. Performance testing meets a need that is very often not covered by unit, integration or end-to-end testing. Using a dedicated performance testing tool, it is easy to test that an application works as expected under heavy load, with acceptable latency and error rate.

K6 is a JavaScript-based performance testing tool from Grafana Labs that is easy to learn. It is flexible, powerful and can cover most needs with included functionality. It also has an easily accessible ecosystem of libraries covering whatever else you might need. You can do authentication, browser testing, GraphQL, web sockets and much more.

This workshop gives a practical introduction meant to give a sufficient knowledge to use it in your daily work. It is targeted to professional developers, but anyone with basic JavaScript knowledge can attend.

Attendees will need to bring their own laptop and install k6, git, a terminal emulator and a JavaScript editor. Installation instructions will be provided, if not installed before the workshop.