Load Impact, the cloud-based performance testing service, today began accepting applications for early access to it’s new Load Impact Continuous Delivery service, which for the fist time allows developers of business-critical websites, apps and APIs to make stress testing an integrated part of their continuous delivery process.
Eric Ericson, director of operations at Baynote, a provider of personalized customer experience solutions for multi-channel retailers, added: “We’ve just started using Load Impact Continuous Delivery for early and continuous feedback on the performance and scalability of our solutions, and we’ve already identified areas where we needed to make adjustments to avoid potentially costly issues that might have impacted our customers.”
Load testing makes it possible to see the performance impact on a website, app or API as the number of users and their geographic locations are increased.
The new Load Impact Continuous Delivery service comprises the Load Impact application programming interface (API), software development kits (SDKs) for a variety of programming languages, and a library of plug-ins and integrations for popular continuous delivery systems.
The API gives developers direct access to the platform of features and functions behind the popular Load Impact On-Demand service, including the ability to create different user scenarios, define and run tests, and extract and graph test results data.
The SDKs make the same features and functions available in popular programming languages, starting with Python and Java. PHP, Ruby and Java Script are scheduled for release before January.
The first plug-in available with Load Impact Continuous Delivery is for Jenkins, which has more than 60,000 continuous delivery installations according to industry reports earlier this year.
The Jenkins plug-in features multisource load testing from up to 12 geographically distributed locations worldwide, advanced scripting, a GUI-based session recorder to easily create tests simulating multiple typical user personas, and Load Impact’s new Server Metrics Agent for correlating the server side impact of users on CPU, memory, disk space and network usage.
Additional integrations and plug-ins are on schedule for New Relic, TeamCity, CloudBees, and Google Analytics among others.
“Making load testing an automated step in your continuous delivery pipeline frees up time for your developers or testers, who would otherwise spend a lot of time on manual load testing,” said Ragnar Lönn, Load Impact founder and CEO. “It also provides you with much earlier warning when some piece of code isn’t performing as well as intended, reducing the amount of time wasted on bad code tracks and ultimately allowing you to release faster and deliver a better end user experience to your customers.”
Pricing and Availability
To request an invitation to test Load Impact Continuous Delivery go to loadimpact.com.
Pricing for the service ranges from free for performance tests simulating fewer than 15 users, up to $100,000 per year subscriptions for tests that simulate an unlimited number of users.
