Why APIs?
From a technological perspective, maintaining a monolithic application and adding new features is a complicated and time-consuming process. Thus, having multiple applications communicating with each other instead is simpler to maintain and to develop.
Also, from a management perspective, this means you can have dedicated product teams for each of your applications. They can be independent and have their own agenda in terms of technologies and features. Finally, from a business perspective, this means a shorter time-to-market and easier integrations with your partners.
In terms of incident management, this means you can easily identify and isolate the failed components.
Load testing APIs
With multiple applications communicating with each other, identifying your performance bottlenecks can be tricky. In fact, a single component can lead to a crash and impact all your users. This is why load testing APIs is one of the most common use cases for Gatling users.
How does it work with Gatling? Gatling’s simulations are code. You can bootstrap your simulation with Gatling’s recorder. The recorder acts as a proxy between the browser and the server and will convert all your requests into a Gatling simulation.
You can then use one of our DSL (Domain-specific Language), based Scala or Java. However, you don’t need to know one of those languages to script your simulations: our DSL is clear, concise and straightforward. Take a look at the Gatling Academy to script your first tests: https://gatling.io/academy/
If you test a REST API, using our DSL, you can parse JSON payloads and send requests with JSON body. Watch our webinar to see how it works. You can also train directly with our last Gatling Academy module: Load Test a RESTful API.