I have an application cluster with several instances running on GCP. There is a load balancer in front of the cluster and auto scaling is enabled. The application makes call to a paid 3rd party API on every request. I want to load test this cluster along with the load balancer to test capacity of this setup without actual making calls to the 3rd party. I'm thinking to have a service outside of the cluster to intercept outbound requests and serve mock data, but it should also be able to handle heavy load. What is the best strategy? Any tools I can use on GCP?
2 Answers
We did this at my shop. We needed to be able to test our SAML rigging in our deployed apps in our dev environment without pinging the SAML provider with all of our testing. So we created an emulator as a microservice and deployed it as its own container onto the dev cluster. It has its own ingress, so we were even able to emulate the experience of "leaving the network."
If you want to generate a Load Test to your environment you need to generate traffic and valid requests against your APP like a real world case. I recommend use a tool like Apache benchmark.
For what I understand you want to test:
1- The Load Balancer
2- The cluster
3- Your internal calls to your third party API
4- Infrastructure resilience
With opensource tools you can stress all of them, then you can monitor the layers independently.
Check more opensource test tools, and choose the best for your purpose. Also review this GCP documentation with an example with a simple web page and how to monitoring it "Quickstart for monitoring a Compute Engine instance"
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