COMBINING PERFORMANCE TESTING AND CHAOS ENGINEERING

Software reliability, scalability, and performance are paramount in today's technology landscape. Performance Testing and Chaos Engineering are individual practices in testing and development to ensure system reliability, scalability, and performance. Alone they are powerful, but really complement each other when used in combination.

Performance Testing assesses an application's speed, responsiveness, and stability under different conditions. It helps identify bottlenecks, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. On the other hand, Chaos Engineering takes a unique approach. It intentionally injects failures and disruptions into a system in a controlled environment to understand how it behaves under adverse conditions. The goal is to identify vulnerabilities before they become critical issues in a production setting, ultimately enhancing a system's resilience.

When combined, Performance Testing and Chaos Engineering can provide a more comprehensive approach to ensure a system's robustness and reliability.

USING CHAOS ENGINEERING TO VALIDATE PERFORMANCE TESTING

Before introducing Chaos Engineering, it's essential to have a good understanding of the system's baseline performance under normal conditions. Once performance testing is conducted, and the system's baseline performance is established, chaos engineering can be applied to validate and augment those findings.

By introducing Chaos Experiments, you can simulate real-world scenarios where the system faces unexpected failures, high loads, or resource constraints, such as:

•  Simulating a degree of resource exhaustion, affecting CPU, memory or I/O availability.

•  Simulating network blackholes and latency.

•  Simulating DNS unavailability.

This validation helps ensure that the system behaves as expected and can even meet performance criteria during challenging conditions.

By combining Performance Testing and Chaos Engineering, you can identify the system's resilience and performance limits more accurately. By comparing performance under normal conditions against disruptive conditions we can determine if the system can handle or recover seamlessly (through automatic failover) from adverse events and continue to meet performance requirements.

GENERATING CONTINOUS IMPROVEMENT

Each practice promotes a culture of continuous improvement. Performance Testing can help identify performance bottlenecks and areas of improvement, which can then be addressed through targeted chaos engineering experiments. Chaos Engineering experiments can expose reliability issues that can be used to refine performance testing scenarios and make them more representative of real-world conditions.

Performance Testing incorporating Chaos Engineering will help organisations build more and more robust and resilient systems that can withstand unexpected events and perform optimally under various conditions.