Simple Load Testing with GitHub Actions

Michael Kalantar Michael is a senior software engineer who has contributed to the design and development of a number of scalable distributed and cloud-based enterprise systems. He is a co-founder of the Iter8 project. In this article, we show how to use GitHub Actions to load-test, benchmark and validate HTTP and gRPC services with service-level objectives (SLOs). When developing a new version of an HTTP or gRPC service, it is desirable to benchmark its performance and to validate that it satisfies desired service-level objectives (SLOs) before upgrading the current version. We describe a no-code approach based on GitHub Actions that can be used to automate such testing at any point in a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. For example, at build time it can be used to validate the new version as soon as possible. Alternatively, at deployment time it can be used to validate SLOs in the production environment. HTTP Load Testing with the Iter8 GitHub Action The Iter8 GitHub Action, iter8-tools/iter8-action@v1, enables automated Iter8 experiments in a GitHub workflow. To use the action, specify an experiment chart and its configuration via a Helm valuesFile. No programming is necessary — all configuration is declarative. Typical use is to Continue reading