Microsoft Azure Load Testing Service Commercially Released -- Redmondmag.com

Microsoft Azure Load Testing Service Commercially Released

By Kurt Mackie
02/02/2023

The Microsoft Azure Load Testing service is now commercially released, according to a Wednesday Microsoft announcement.

The service lets organizations test applications for performance bottlenecks, wherever they are hosted, including on-premises apps. The tests are conducted by simulating users, allowing organizations to gauge beforehand how their applications might perform, including when app access demands might increase. Azure Load Testing is designed for use by "developers, testers and quality assurance engineers," and it can be part of a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) developer workflow, according this Microsoft document.

Azure Load Testing uses Apache JMeter, which is an open source performance and load testing tool. The service will automatically abstract the conditions and create a URL for running the JMeter tests, which Microsoft calls a "Quickstart." Alternatively, organizations can use their own JMeter scripts with the service. Organizations may want to use their own scripts for advanced testing scenarios, such as planning to test "multiple application requests," or use "input data and parameters" during the tests, Microsoft's document explained.

Azure Load Testing will show client-side and server-side testing details. The client-side stats might be "the number of virtual users, the request response time, or the number of requests per second." If Azure Load Testing is used with hosted Azure apps, organizations will get information about their use of Azure components, which can be viewed using the Azure Monitor portal.

The Azure Load Testing service includes safeguards when encountering certain errors to avoid extra runtime costs, such as "an incorrectly configured endpoint URL," the document explained. Users can configure the number of test engines to be run. Microsoft defines a test engine as "computing infrastructure, managed by Microsoft that runs the Apache JMeter test script" per this "Key Concepts" document.

The pricing for Azure Load Testing is described here. It's based on "Virtual User Hours" plus a monthly resources cost. It's currently available in 11 Microsoft regions (located in parts of Australia, East Asia, Europe, Sweden and the United States), as listed at this page.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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