How Bouygues Telecom optimized performance and scaled infrastructure with Gatling Enterprise Edition

Bouygues Telecom’s Journey with Gatling Enterprise Edition

As Bouygues Telecom’s infrastructure expanded to support millions of connected devices—such as set-top boxes, smart TVs, and mobile applications—they needed a performance testing solution capable of handling complex systems, partner integrations, and unpredictable traffic spikes. Ensuring minimal latency during peak usage was critical to maintaining a smooth user experience.

To meet their growing needs, Bouygues Telecom adopted Gatling to carry out both local testing and large-scale simulations. Initially, they used the core features of the Community Edition to validate their performance during development stages. However, as the scale and complexity increased, they turned to the Enterprise plan to unlock more advanced features.

Their pain points:

• Scalability limits: With millions of devices—set-top boxes, smart TVs, and mobile apps—connecting simultaneously, Bouygues Telecom needed to simulate traffic spikes their existing tools, like JMeter and Gatling Community Edition, couldn’t handle. These tools struggled to simulate 100,000 concurrent connections, critical to their operations.

• Regional performance issues: Bouygues encountered regional issues with cloud services like API Gateway. The Paris region couldn’t handle high traffic, while the Ireland region managed it but added latency. They needed a solution that maintained performance across regions without sacrificing speed or reliability.

• Lack of automations: Without automated testing, development cycles were slowed by time-consuming manual processes. This delayed problem-solving and consumed resources, impacting critical fixes and optimizations.

• Performance bottlenecks: High device traffic, where each connection required a new session, strained infrastructure, causing latency, particularly in TLS handshakes and database queries, and creating bottlenecks during peak periods.

• Limited reporting  & collaboration: Teams needed detailed, shareable reports for better performance analysis and collaboration. Without real-time insights, tracking issues, sharing findings, and making decisions during load-testing phases was challenging.

How Gatling Enterprise Edition helped Bouygues Telecom

• Massive load simulation: Bouygues Telecom used Gatling Enterprise Edition to simulate up to 100,000 concurrent requests per second, allowing them to replicate real-world traffic and test millions of connected devices. This revealed critical bottlenecks under high-stress conditions. Gatling’s flexibility enabled simulations for a range of traffic types, including API requests and customer journeys, ensuring comprehensive testing.

• Full automation through CI/CD: Integrating Gatling Enterprise Edition into their CI/CD pipeline automated performance testing for every code commit or deployment, eliminating manual intervention and saving time. This allowed the team to focus on optimization and run daily or weekly tests to continuously monitor system stability and proactively resolve performance issues.

• Advanced reporting & insights: Gatling’s reporting features provided Bouygues Telecom with detailed, shareable reports, improving collaboration across departments and with external partners like AWS. The ability to track test configurations and analyze performance issues, such as API throttling, helped optimize infrastructure and streamline problem-solving.

• Optimized latency & infrastructure E-efficiency: Using Gatling Enterprise Edition, Bouygues Telecom reduced latency to sub-100ms for internal processes, with critical applications achieving sub-1ms. Gatling’s Managed Load Generators, positioned close to their app, further improved performance during peak traffic, ensuring a smooth user experience.

Bouygues Telecom's results

• True production-scale traffic dimulation: Bouygues Telecom successfully simulated up to 100,000 concurrent requests and handled peaks of 22 Gbps, significantly boosting their ability to manage high traffic volumes during critical spikes.

• Major time & resource saving: The integration of automated testing within their CI/CD pipeline reduced manual work, improving testing efficiency and allowing faster, more confident feature deployments.

• Significant latency improvements: Gatling’s Managed Load Generators, positioned close to their application, helped Bouygues Telecom achieve sub-100ms latency for internal processes, with critical applications reaching sub-1ms, ensuring seamless service during peak usage.

“Gatling Enterprise Edition allowed us to simulate extremely high traffic without overloading our infrastructure. It quickly became an indispensable part of our development pipeline”

Sylvain Duarte, Software Engineer at Bouygues Telecom

What’s next for Bouygues Telecom

Bouygues Telecom plans to further expand their usage of Gatling Enterprise Edition by:

• Integrating automated performance thresholds into pull requests,

• Increasing test frequency to daily load tests,

• Strengthening their performance testing capabilities to ensure their infrastructure can effortlessly absorb growing traffic while maintaining a seamless and reliable user experience.

With Gatling Enterprise Edition, Bouygues Telecom is now equipped to ensure their services remain fast, reliable, and scalable for millions of users.