Load testing may seem like a tiresome, difficult, and expensive task, however that is actually far from the truth. Here at RedLine13 we’re all about “almost” free load testing, and even when you do have to pay for testing, the cost is exponentially less compared to other services out there. Additionally, load testing isn’t necessarily as complicated or involved as you might think, as our users and others have been saying.
Martin Larsen, the Senior Developer for Queue-it, recently wrote a few posts about the various ways that you can run pain-free and affordable load testing. For those unfamiliar with the company, Queue-it is “a software company that provides a SaaS queue page product to customers globally. The use of Queue-it provides online fairness for transactional websites and their end-users[1. Queue-it About Me page]”. In his articles, he touches upon the tools that are out there that users can take advantage of, and he was impressed with what RedLine13 offers:
The painful process is one reason why the majority of our customers have no idea when or why their software breaks. Luckily, there is another way. Less painful. Almost free… If you have tried to execute a load test in a distributed environment, you know that it is painful. You need to deploy your test to multiple servers, then they need to execute simultaneously, and at the end, you need to collect the results of the test and visualize them. While you can do this yourself, it is a lot less painful to use a SaaS service…RedLine13 is a free load testing service that allows you to run your tests with your own AWS Spot Instances. Although spot instances are not free, you will be able to run a test with thousands of concurrent users for a couple of US dollars. So there you have it. Almost free web application load testing, with less pain.
Additionally Martin went on to discuss how cloud computing and cloud-based load testing made these services even more accessible to users (which happens to be an ongoing industry trend), again, highlighting some of the benefits of RedLine13:
With cloud computing, load testing at scale became available to anyone. You no longer have to invest in hardware to run your test. With a credit card and a few clicks, you have all the computing power you will ever need. But with this distributed setup of short lived test nodes comes complexity. Management of node life cycle, software installation, test distribution, and collecting results, to name a few. A number of SaaS services have emerged to reduce this complexity, such as BlazeMeter. One of them, RedLine13 stands out from the others by being almost free. All you need to pay for are the AWS EC2 instances you use in your own account. For a large test, this is typically less than $5 USD per hour.
As it would appear, Mr. Larsen is quite pleased with RedLine13 when it comes to affordable, cloud-based load testing solutions. We would like to personally extend our gratitude to Martin and Queue-it for not only writing about RedLine13 and discussing their experiences, but for creating an informative and educational video as well. In the video, they take a look at how you can begin to run load tests with Gatling and RedLine13. Naturally, this content enhances both the RedLine13 community and the Gatling community, making it very beneficial for both. For more, refer to the video below or pay Queue-it and RedLine13 a visit.