Distributed Load Testing Using Locust
Article Summary
Glance's engineering team scaled their load testing from basic scripts to a full Kubernetes-powered distributed system. Here's how they did it with Locust.
Ricky Mondal, Senior Software Engineer at Atlassian (formerly at Glance), shares a comprehensive guide to building scalable load testing infrastructure. The article walks through everything from basic Locust setup to deploying distributed tests across Kubernetes clusters.
Key Takeaways
- Locust beats JMeter with Python-based tests and event-driven architecture
- Structured codebase lets N microservices test independently without conflicts
- Custom Docker images plus master-worker K8s architecture enable massive scale
- FastHttpUser mode and auto-rebalancing workers maximize RPS throughput
- HPA on worker pods auto-scales based on CPU thresholds
Critical Insight
You can build production-grade distributed load testing with Locust, Docker, and Kubernetes that scales to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
