Your team is probably not load testing in production, but your team probably should.

Running production systems at scale is hard, and is not getting any easier. Our systems keep getting more complex, and complexity means risk – risk of outages, downtime and drops in performance. More and more teams adopt chaos testing practices and focus on production observability to understand and control that complexity, but one testing technique is frequently overlooked – and that is load testing in production. The idea may elicit resistance and may not sound safe, but there are tried and tested ways to make it work, and the payoff is worth it. The kind of confidence production load testing can give you is impossible to match with other kinds of testing. This talk is based on the author’s experience of implementing production load testing at several companies in industries ranging from ecommerce to publishing. We’ll look at:

• Common objections to load testing in production
• How to communicate the value of production load testing to the rest of the business
• Common challenges and pitfalls when load testing in production
• How to run load tests in production safely
• An actionable roadmap for getting to your first production load test