In this very first post let’s explore how to run the k6 load testing tool easily and on demand on Azure Container Instances (ACIs).

Load testing is a type of performance testing where we simulate a specific workload (concurrent users accessing the system) and observe the system’s behaviour under this load.

You might already have your favourite tool for the job that you run locally or on a dedicated server from the command line. Maybe you have found it nicely packaged up on Docker Hub, pulled it to your computer and ran it that way… and started wondering how to do the same in the cloud!

After covering the basics about k6 and ACIs, we still haven’t run our own tests. We saw that k6 can grab a JavaScript load test file from the web, and initiate requests to the endpoint(s) specified there. It means we can do the same and host a test file ourselves in our GitHub repo or anywhere else where it’s publicly accessible!

Before doing that though… Let’s see how to write these tests.