Week of Testing: Day 4 - Load profiles on k6

k6 has a cool feature where even if you start a load test locally via the CLI, you can still stream the results to k6 Cloud. It’s an interesting compromise between debugging a test locally (and therefore not paying for cloud infrastructure) and sharing results for load tests run on the cloud. It worked seamlessly, too.

I also wanted to see how to recreate a specific load profile that I commonly use - the stepped load profile. In JMeter, I typically do this with a plugin - the jp@gc Ultimate Thread Group is my thread group of choice. So, I created it in JMeter (I love that it shows a little image of it as well, while you’re building it) and then attempted to recreate it in k6.

I definitely had to look at the k6 documentation for this. I used the constant-vus executor for this, but k6 has several other executors to choose from, and it worked as well as I had hoped.

So far, my experience with k6 has been positive. Things are well-documented, and they just work out of the box. No plugins necessary.

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