How to Test Application Resilience Under Load with K6 and Chaos Engineering | Harness Blog

Resilience testing combines load testing and chaos engineering to assess whether applications maintain core functionality when failures occur during heavy traffic, revealing weaknesses that performance testing alone may miss. The approach uses Grafana K6 to generate realistic user demand and Harness Resilience Testing to introduce controlled disruptions such as network latency or loss, API errors, pod deletions, and resource stress in a Kubernetes-hosted Online Boutique microservices application. Teams define a steady-state hypothesis through continuous resilience probes that monitor service latency, HTTP responses, query performance, pod replica counts, and node health, producing a resilience score based on probe success. The outlined process includes configuring access and role permissions, installing a Harness Delegate, connecting the target cluster, creating probes and K6 load experiments, building targeted fault scenarios, and running load and chaos tests in parallel through pipelines. The guidance recommends using recurring, production-relevant failure scenarios, recovery mechanisms such as retries and circuit breakers, observability tools, and CI/CD integration to identify and address reliability risks before real incidents occur.

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