We are months into our Azure Load Testing Preview. It’s a fully managed Azure service for developers and testers to generate high-scale load with custom Apache JMeter scripts and gain actionable insights to catch and fix performance bottlenecks at scale.
Businesses small and large, across industries like information technology, financial services, government services etc. have leveraged Azure Load Testing Preview to increase their confidence in being able to identify performance issues before they happen in production. Integrating load testing with CI/CD pipelines through GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines enable identification of performance issues early in the app development process.
We’ve been engaging our customers to improve the service and cater to more load testing scenarios. Based on the insight from your feedback, here are new features we offer now.
- Quick tests help you set up, run, and test your websites performance in minutes by simply entering your URL in our Azure portal. You don’t need to have prior knowledge of testing tools to get started on your load testing journey.
- You will be able to provide larger datasets as input and will be able to better simulate real world load scenarios by splitting the input data across multiple test engines.
- You can now make your test more configurable by keeping test settings outside of the JMeter script by using a user properties file to update the standard JMeter properties. This will enable you to use the same JMX test script across deployment environments, load patterns etc.
- Besides the default security that Microsoft provides by automatically encrypting all your data stored in the Azure Load Testing Preview resource with service-managed keys, you can now add another layer of security by bringing your own customer-managed keys.
- You can now use Azure Active Directory managed identities with Azure Load Testing Preview resource to easily access other Azure AD-protected resources, such as Azure Key Vault. Both system-assigned and user-assigned managed identities are supported.
More features are coming soon.
- Extend the core functionality of Apache JMeter by using plugins. You can reference the plugins from https://jmeter-plugins.org or upload them in the form of a Java archive (JAR) file.
- Leverage Azure Load Testing Preview to test private endpoints deployed behind a firewall and endpoints with access restrictions.
- Support for up to 50,000 concurrent virtual users in a load test.
We are committed to providing the best user experience for Azure Load Testing Preview, ensuring it’s secure, high-performing, and available in more regions in the coming months. So be sure to visit Azure Updates frequently.
You can get started with Azure Load Testing by creating an Azure Load Testing resource in the Azure portal. Check out our preview documentation and create your first load test.
Learn more about pricing details on our Azure Load Testing pricing page.
And we’d love to hear from you through our feedback forum.
