Automated deployment of load generators

The main pain of load testing is infrastructure. When you need to load test your application, you need one or several load generators, that will generate load, ie virtual users navigating on your application. How does it work? The load generator generates requests and measures the response times of each request and aggregates the metrics.

Generating load with Gatling

When you are deploying Gatling (on your laptop or a dedicated server), Gatling is the load generator itself. Where to deploy Gatling? It depends on your requirements. On your laptop, you won’t be able to generate a high volume of virtual users and you won’t be sure that your metrics won’t be altered by another software running on your laptop. But this is perfect to run small tests and make sure your simulation works.

We recommend to deploy Gatling on a dedicated server, either an on-premises one or on the cloud. Is there any difference between an on-premises server and the cloud for Gatling? No, both solutions are perfect. Make sure that nothing else runs on the server in order to make sure to get real-life data. You are ready to run your load testing campaign!

How to automate the deployment of load generators?

Gatling, however, doesn’t support automated deployments of load generators. If you want to run tests with multiple load generators, or open instances, deploy load generators and automatically close them after the end of the test, you need to run your tests with Gatling Enterprise.

Gatling Enterprise is the interface to manage all the steps of your load testing campaigns, from deployment to analysis. Gatling Enterprise comes also with multi-tenant support, where different users from your organization can configure and run their tests.

When you start a test, Gatling Enterprise automatically open instances, either on on-premises server, via your favorite cloud provider or even via Kubernetes or OpenShift, deploy one or several load generators, run the tests, aggregate the metrics from all your load generators, and close the instances after the end of the test. You don’t need to worry about infrastructure anymore!

With Gatling Enterprise, your Ops can connect to the interface and configure in advance the infrastructure required for the load tests, and configure permissions for the different users within your organization. Infrastructure is key in load testing. Make sure it is properly managed thanks to Gatling Enterprise.