[Update on March 18, 2025: AI-powered load test generation, referred to in the third section below, is in preview now!]

Azure Load Testing (ALT) has been an essential tool for performance testing, enabling customers across industries to run thousands of tests every month. We are thrilled to celebrate its second anniversary with two major announcements. In this blog post, we will delve into the remarkable capabilities of ALT and reveal the exciting developments that will redefine load testing for you.

Why do customers love ALT?

ALT is a powerful service designed to ensure that your applications can handle high traffic and perform optimally under peak load. Here are some key features of ALT:

• Large-scale tests: Simulate over 100,000 concurrent users.
• Long-duration tests: Run tests for up to 24 hours.
• Multi-region tests: Simultaneously simulate users from any of the 20 supported regions.
• Continuous tests: Catch performance regression early by integrating with Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, or other CI/CD systems.
• Comprehensive test results: Correlate server-side metrics with client-side metrics for end-to-end insights.
• Analytics and insights: Quickly and easily identify performance bottlenecks with detailed analytics.

Pricing Changes: Listening to You

We have heard your feedback and are excited to announce significant pricing changes, effective March 1, 2025:

• No monthly resource fee: We have eliminated the $10 monthly resource fee to help you save on overall costs.
• 20% price reduction: The cost per Virtual User Hour (VUH) for >10,000 VUH is reduced from 7.5 cents to 6 cents.

Additionally, we are introducing a feature to set a consumption limit per resource. This will enable central teams, such as the Performance Center of Excellence, to effectively manage and control the costs incurred by each team.

These changes reflect our commitment to making ALT more accessible and cost-effective, ensuring that you can optimize your applications without worrying about budget constraints.

Locust-Based Tests: Offering You a Choice

In another exciting development, we are delighted to announce the availability of Locust-based tests. This addition allows you to leverage the power, flexibility, and developer-friendly nature of the Python-based Locust load testing framework, in addition to already supported Apache JMeter load testing framework.

We are also working on making it easy for you to generate tests by leveraging AI. With our integration with GitHub Copilot, you will be able to simply start with a Postman Collection or an HTTP file and leverage the copilot to generate Locust-based tests. Stay tuned!

This update opens new possibilities for you, providing a choice of load testing frameworks and making it easy to generate tests.

In Summary

As we celebrate the second anniversary, we are committed to continually improving and evolving the service to meet your needs. With the introduction of half a dozen features (1. consumption limits, 2. Locust-based tests, 3. support for multiple test files, 4. scheduling, 5. notifications, 6. support for managed identity) apart from pricing changes, we are confident that ALT will continue to be an indispensable tool for your performance testing arsenal.

We are excited about all the 50+ updates over two years and look forward to seeing how they enhance your testing processes. Thank you for being a part of our journey, and we can't wait to see what you achieve with ALT. If you would like to share how you were able to leverage ALT for an interesting scenario, email me at shon dot shah at microsoft dot com or post your feedback at https://aka.ms/malt-feedback.

Happy load testing!