Tom Donohue

Incidents are expensive, stressful, and lead to poor user experiences. The good news is that they’re also preventable. With the right tools and practices, you can uncover and address performance issues before they affect your users.

Performance issues are easier to address when you find them before your users do. In this beginner-friendly, hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to combine load testing and observability to understand how your applications behave under load.

You’ll write and run k6 scripts, simulate API traffic, define checks and performance thresholds, and analyze results in Grafana to identify potential bottlenecks.

We’ll then explore how to scale beyond a single machine using the k6 Operator to orchestrate distributed load tests on Kubernetes.

By the end of this two-hour workshop, you’ll be able to:

• Write and run k6 scripts to test APIs under load.
• Use checks and thresholds to evaluate responses and performance.
• Interpret test results in Grafana.
• Understand how the k6 Operator distributes tests across Kubernetes runners.

Requirements:

• Laptop with WiFi, a browser, terminal, and code editor
• Git
• Docker with Docker Compose
• kind and kubectl - kind runs the local Kubernetes cluster using Docker