As holiday season winds down, we can reflect on the reverse load test that we did to make sure our customers could prepare for their own holiday traff

The reverse load test: it worked for us

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2023-01-24 04:30:06

As holiday season winds down, we can reflect on the reverse load test that we did to make sure our customers could prepare for their own holiday traffic.

What’s a reverse load test? OK, it's a term we just made up. But it started like any load test, with two systems: the load generator and the system under test (SUT). The focus of our test, however, was inverted.

In normal load tests, testers really care only about how the SUT performs—that’s the point of the test. As long as the load generator generates the correct workflows and doesn’t use so much CPU that it skews results, its performance doesn’t matter much.

In a typical load test, we study how load affects SUT performance.

But what if you were in the business of generating load—lots of load, distributed across a cluster of computers? That happens to be the business of k6 Cloud. While our customers care about the systems that they load, we care that our system can generate the load that they need, and process the test metrics for them in an intuitive, explorable way.