Load testing is a crucial step in the software development process that ensures the performance of your workload before deployment. Synthetic monitoring is used for monitoring the health and availability of applications and APIs in production. While load testing and synthetic monitoring test the same application flow, they use different load characteristics and tools, resulting in duplication of effort.
CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to create and run synthetic monitoring canaries in Node.js or Python to monitor production workloads. AWS Step Functions support performing large-scale parallel tasks using distributed map state, providing a solution for load testing. By creating a canary for synthetic monitoring and invoking it at scale using distributed map state, you can simulate the load on your workload.
Creating a CloudWatch Synthetics canary involves selecting blueprints, writing scripts, and using specific frameworks. The canary runs periodic tests on your workload, records metrics in CloudWatch, and captures screenshots. You can also invoke the canary outside of CloudWatch Synthetics for load testing purposes.
Additional steps include creating a Step Functions state machine orchestrating the parallel invocation of the canary and adjusting concurrency settings for load testing. Monitoring and optimizations are necessary to ensure effective load testing, such as managing Lambda concurrency limits and modifying canary code for different environments.
Troubleshooting may be necessary for issues like stragglers in the load test or exceeding Lambda execution time limits. Cleanup steps involve deleting CloudFormation stacks, artifacts in S3 buckets, and canaries to avoid ongoing charges.
In conclusion, CloudWatch Synthetics and AWS Step Functions offer a solution for synthetic monitoring and load testing using canaries. This approach optimizes load testing processes and provides insights into workload performance. Additional resources are available for extending this solution to test more complex interactions. Rakshith Rao, a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, works with strategic customers to implement key workloads on AWS.
Article Source
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/reduce-code-duplication-in-load-testing-and-synthetic-monitoring-using-amazon-cloudwatch-synthetics/