Performance tests are not only an important instrument for understanding a system and its runtime environment. It is also essential in order to check stability and scalability – non-functional requirements that might be decisive for success. But won't my cloud hosting service scale for me as long as I can afford it? Yes, but… It only operates and scales resources. It won't automatically make your system fast, stable and scalable. This talk shows how such and comparable questions can be clarified with performance tests and how DevOps teams benefit from regular test practise.

1. Performance Testing
for DevOps in the Cloud
Lars Wolff
Amsterdam | April 2-3, 2019

2. Introduction
@larsvegas
support@stormforger.com
My Journey so far
• Software engineering
• Consulting and Agile coaching
• Performance Testing
• Ship it!
• AWS User Group Cologne & AWS Community Days Germany

3. Performance Testing SaaS for DevOps
Empower organizations to embrace
continuous performance testing

4. Performance

5. Performance
• Frontend Performance
• Backend Performance

6. Performance
The ability of a system to execute one task
within a defined dimension
= efficiency of a system
↪ 1 server manages 250 rps with p99 500ms.

7. Scalability

8. ≠
Performance
Scalability

9. Scalability
capacity
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
resources
5 10 15 20 25 30
Effectivity by which the capacity
can be increased through adding
resources

10. What makes me recognize that
I have a performance problem?
http://www.slideshare.net/jboner/scalability-availability-stability-patterns/15-How_do_I_know_if

11. If your system is slow
for one single user.

12. What makes me recognize that
I have a scaling problem?
http://www.slideshare.net/jboner/scalability-availability-stability-patterns/15-How_do_I_know_if

13. If your system is fast for single users
but slow under load.

14. The Cloud™ already scales
for us 👍

15. Yes.

16. But.
No.

17. scaling resources
≠
scaling applications

19. Create an understanding of your
system, its cloud run time
environment and behaviour

20. Communication Collaboration Automation Monitoring
DevOps

21. PerformanceTesting

22. “In software engineering,
performance testing is in general,
a testing practice performed to
determine how a system performs
in terms of responsiveness and stability
under a particular workload.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_performance_testing
– Wikipedia

23. "
🔬
$

24. Performance Tests
• Collection of
non-functional test methods
• Not to be defined with
absolute selectivity
• Different goals and perspectives
Load Testing
Stress Testing
Spike Testing
Soak Testing
Endurance Testing
Resilience Testing
Configuration Testing
Scalability Testing

25. Performance Tests?
• Not only for testing releases
• Evaluation of…
• technology,
• proof of concepts,
• troubleshooting and debugging

26. less traffic
≠
no performance problems 😉

27. How do you do it?

28. Performance Testing Maturity
• no performance tests, at all 😅
• tests if problems occur during production 🔥🚨🔥
• tests (shortly) before large-scale (sales & marketing) campaigns )
• regular testing ) )
• tests as a regular, integrated DevOps instrument ) ) ) ) )

29. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps
DevOps

30. Performance testing is hard

31. Challenges
• organizational obstacles, e.g. buy-in
(management & team)
• testing goal & scope
• visibility in your own systems
• The right performance test tool for the job
– (usually) no tooling problem
• start! 😉 👍😁

32. Starting
…but how?

33. Steps to Perf Tests™
• bring together the stakeholders + development
🤓 operations
🐜 QA
👷 product
💰 management
😱 marketing

34. Steps to Perf Tests™
Kick off for 15 Min
– All Stakeholders Heads Up
STATE
We’ll NOW create a performance testing culture to make sure that we can
hold our promise to the business/customer to be fast and available under
different amount of usage/users/transactions.
We so match performance and availability requirements to keep the
business save.
ASK
Do you all agree?
STATE
OK, we start with testing a very easy use case to raise a baseline of numbers
about performance and availability. This friday, it’ll take a 2 hrs timebox.
+ development
🤓 operations
🐜 QA
👷 product
💰 management
😱 marketing

36. Steps to Perf Tests™
Test Case
• Create a first, simple Test Case
• Q: Test Data?
• Q: How much traffic?

37. Steps to Perf Tests™
Test Case
• Ask Analytics
for the hour of the highest
number of users in a week.
• Analytics:
We have 10.000 visits in this
hour. The Users visits flower-list,
one flower detail.
30% check out and payment.

38. Steps to Perf Tests™
Test Case
• Test Environment &
Load Generator Setup
• Since Infrastructure is code:
Just start your test environment!

39. War Room

40. Steps to Perf Tests™
Run Test
• 20 Minutes
• Invite ALL stakeholders!
• It’s about collaboration

41. Steps to Perf Tests™
Inspect Report
• Response Time?
• If errors occurred:
Do you see these in your
monitoring, too?

42. Steps to Perf Tests™
Meet and communicate to stakeholders:
• ONE Statement like
We aim for baseline numbers.
We tested flower-list and flower-detail.
We created 4x traffic of peak hour.
We saw 20% of errors.
But always responded in under 1000ms (p99).
• Ask
Are you happy?
• Ask
Whats’ next? Checkout?
+ development
🤓 operations
🐜 QA
👷 product
💰 management
😱 marketing

43. Steps to Perf Tests™
Test Case
• Add Checkout

44. Iterate

45. 😎

46. Steps to Perf Tests™
Non-functional requirements
• No errors!
• Each request must be faster than
250ms p99th

47. Steps to Perf Tests™
Automate
• Run test runs from any pipeline
• Run automated checks of
non-functional requirements

48. 😎😎

49. It’s a feedback loop
Stakeholder
Requirements
Definition
(test scenario)
Execution
(test case)
Result Interpretation &
Reporting
Business
Needs

50. Start creating a
Community of practice
Special Interest Group
since performance testing is an orthogonal topic

51. Thanks! 😁 Lars Wolff
@larsvegas
support@stormforger.com
https://stormforger.com
Slides and more:
http://bit.ly/codemotion2019

52. Performance Testing SaaS for DevOps
Empower organizations to embrace
continuous performance testing
http://bit.ly/codemotion2019

54. Extras:

55. Solutions

56. Defining goals
• Defining goals beforehand (why are we doing tests?)
• Important!
Always define goals (and requirements) from the specialist side ☝
• A goal can be very simple at first, e.g. “surviving Black Friday well” or
“we want to become 20% faster”.

57. Where to start with testing?
• defining System Under Test (SUT)
• finding the right scope
• perimeter/end-to-end tests
• components/service tests

58. System Under Test
• testing “from top” (end-to-end) or
“sideward” against single services
• for the compartment side, only
integrative tests are interesting
• testing single services for the
purpose of trouble shooting
(technical perspective)

59. Define requirements
• make assumptions for non-functional requirements (NFR)
• assistance via “baseline” performance tests and performance
budgets
• simple requirements might be: “deliver sites under 2sec”, “10k
checkouts per hour”, …
• also here: start simple, learn, improve, repeat!
• do sanity checks!

60. + development
🤓 operations
🐜 QA
scenarios
• bouncing visitor
• returning customer
• walk-in customer
• …
👷 product
💰 management
😱 marketing
workloads
• Black Friday peak hour
• average peak hour
• 3 hour fire sale
• …
Who?
What?

61. Testing together
• Especially before the first tests: involve all the stakeholders!
• GO!
• Present setup, assumptions and findings
• Check or rework scenario sanity
• Repeat!

62. Performance Budget
Browser
🔥Firewall🔥
Load Balancer
Webserver
App Server
Service A Service B …
FACT-FinderFACT-FinderFACT-Finder
MySQLMySQLMySQL
☁☁
MySQLMySQLCache
……

63. Testing Types and Strategies

64. Stress Testing
• Tests with increased up to extreme load
• Understanding system behavior under (over)load
• Identify limits and capacities

65. Stress Testing procedure
• Define quality criteria
(OK / KO)
• Gradually increase load

66. Stress Testing procedure
• Monitor system behavior
• Identify bottlenecks
• Detect capacity per resource

67. Scalability Testing
• How effective are more resources transformed into capacity?
• Foundation for capacity planning and cost estimation

68. Scalability Testing
capacity
0
275
550
825
1100
resources
5 10 15 20 25 30

69. Spike Testing
• How does the system react during
(extreme) peak loads?
• Are we reacting fast enough?
• Occasions: Marketing 😈, Reddit,
Hacker News, …, TV shows

70. Soak Testing
• How does the system behave under load during a long period of time?
• (very) long load test
• Are there any longtime effects? Memory leaks?

71. Configuration Testing
• How does the behavior change if the configuration modifies?
• Series of test executions
• Investigate the impact of the environment on your own system

72. …in the cloud
• Types of instances
• Auto scaling settings
• Throughput provisioning
• Ideal usage of services?

73. …and in general…
• Hypervisor
• Operating system
• Web & application server
• Software configuration
• Software dependencies

74. Availability & Resilience
Testing

75. Availability & Resilience Testing
• (Zero-Downtime) deployments under load
• Changes in infrastructure
• Error scenarios
• Failover testing
• => Chaos engineering