k6 is open source tool developed by Grafana Labs. Performance testing can now be done more effectively and with greater enjoyment thanks to the open-source, free, developer-focused load test tool known as “k6.” With “k6,” you can detect performance regression and issues before they become serious, enabling the development of reliable systems and applications. This framework is created with GO. It has an embedded JavaScript engine, goja, on which your test scripts run on, enabling you to write tests in JavaScript and TypeScript.
For modern engineering teams. The k6 API and CLI are designed to be intuitive, flexible, and powerful.
Use cases
k6 is typically used by development, QA, and DevOps engineering teams to evaluate the performance of APIs, microservices, and websites. Common use cases for k6 include load testing, which is designed to minimize system resource usage, as well as performance monitoring, to monitor the performance of a production environment. With this tool, users have the ability to run high-load tests in pre-production and QA settings (such as spike, stress, and soak tests), and also have the ability to run tests with a minimal amount of load to monitor performance.
k6 Benefits
K6 provides many benefits, including an easy-to-use developer-based API and CLI. The intuitive, versatile, and powerful API and CLI make it simple to develop and manage your test suite. Additionally, k6 allows for tests to be written in JavaScript, a familiar scripting language, and to be reused with modules and JavaScript libraries. Furthermore, it is designed for automated testing, allowing for tests to be passed or failed according to performance goals. Additionally, it can be connected to standard CI systems in order to send test results to multiple backends and formats, such as DataDog, Kafka, CloudWatch, NewRelic, JSON, and CSV. The K6 engine is written in Go, making it one of the most efficient load testing tools available. Finally, k6 is designed for effortless cloud scaling, allowing for the same tests to be used in both a distributed environment and the cloud on your local PC.
Trade-offs
k6 is a high-performance load testing tool that is scriptable with JavaScript. It offers several trade-offs: it does not run in a browser, meaning that API-supported libraries are not compatible and system resource usage is reduced. Despite this, it can still be utilized to load test websites, as well as to record user sessions. Additionally, it is not running on NodeJS, but the JavaScript execution time enables optimum speed. Webpack can be used to bundle npm modules and integrate them into tests, while NodeJS APIs can be used to import npm modules or libraries.