Chaos Engineering with k6 and Steadybit - There’s more than Performance Testing

The blog post emphasizes the importance of combining performance testing with chaos engineering to enhance software resilience in today's distributed environments. It highlights a step-by-step approach using k6 for load testing and Steadybit for chaos engineering to simulate real-world conditions where systems may not perform optimally. The post details the process of creating and executing a performance test on an online shop's microservices architecture using k6, ensuring that the system can handle a load of 50 simultaneous users. It then introduces a resilience experiment using Steadybit to simulate a microservice failure, specifically testing if the system maintains performance goals when one instance of a microservice becomes unresponsive. The integration of k6 with Steadybit allows for testing under turbulent conditions, revealing potential vulnerabilities and guiding infrastructure improvements to meet reliability standards. The post concludes with the suggestion of an alternative approach where k6 could initiate the resilience experiment through Steadybit's API, with more details on this method promised in a future post.