Microsoft Introduces Fully-Managed Azure Load Testing Service for Developers

Microsoft announced yesterday the general availability of its Azure Load Testing service. The new fully managed service is designed to help developers and quality assurance (QA) teams optimize the performance and scalability of their apps and services.

Load testing is a technique that enables developers to test the performance of their applications under real-life conditions. It lets them put high demand on any network, database, and application to evaluate a system’s ability to handle a large number of simultaneous users. Load testing is necessary for situations when any code changes occur that might impact the performance of the application.

Microsoft’s new Azure Load Testing service helps developers to test the resilience of their apps and services to cope with unexpected increases in customer traffic. It lets customers automate regression testing by running load tests in GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines. Then, they can analyze test results across various load tests to understand behavior changes.

“Our goal at Microsoft is to help developers do more with less effort. When performance, scalability, or resiliency issues are identified in production or even close to production they can be extremely difficult and costly to resolve. With Azure Load Testing developers can catch issues closer to code authoring time as part of their developer workflows saving them valuable time and energy,” explained Mandy Whaley, Partner Director of Product for Azure Dev Tools.

Azure Load Testing provides performance insights with client and service side metrics

Microsoft Azure Load Testing also provides integrations with related products such as Azure Monitor. It collects client and service-side telemetry data to make it easier to monitor their apps and services. Customers can view performance insights in the Azure Load Testing dashboard. Moreover, software testers can reuse existing Apache JMeter test scripts for advanced load-testing scenarios.

To get started, you can head over to the Azure portal and create an Azure Load Testing resource. You can check out Microsoft’s official website to learn more about the pricing details and purchasing options.