I don't know why, but I am a bit obsessed with load testing tools. I've tried dozens, I built or been involved in the creation of over ten of them in the past 15 years. I am talking about load testing HTTP services with a simple HTTP client.

Three years ago I built Loads at Mozilla, which is still being used to load test our services - and it's still evolving. It was based on a few fundamental principles:

A Load test is an integration test that's executed many times in parallel against a server. Ideally, load tests should be built with vanilla Python and a simple HTTP client. There's no mandatory reason we have to rely on a Load Test class or things like this - the lighter the load test framework is, the better. You should be able to run a load test from your laptop without having to deploy a complicated stack, like a load testing server and clients, etc. Because when you start building a load test against an API, step #1 is to start with small loads from one box - not going nuclear from AWS on day 1. Doing a massively distributed load test should not happen & be driven from your laptop. Your load test is one brick and orchestrating a distributed load test is a problem that should be entirely solved by another software that runs in the cloud on its own.

Since Loads was built, two major things happened in our little technical word:

Docker is everywhere

Python 3.5 & asyncio, yay!

Python 3.5+ & asyncio just means that unlike my previous attempts at building a tool that would generate as many concurrent requests as possible, I don't have to worry anymore about key principle #2: we can do async code now in vanilla Python, and I don't have to force ad-hoc async frameworks on people.

Docker means that for running a distributed test, a load test that runs from one box can be embedded inside a Docker image, and then a tool can orchestrate a distributed test that runs and manages Docker images in the cloud.

That's what we've built with Loads: "give me a Docker image of something that's performing a small load test against a server, and I shall run it in hundreds of box." This Docker-based design was a very elegant evolution of Loads thanks to Ben Bangert who had that idea. Asking for people to embed their load test inside a Docker image also means that they can use whatever tool they want as long as it performs HTTP calls on the server to stress, and optionally send some info via statsd.

But proposing a helpful, standard tool to build the load test script that will be embedded in Docker is still something we want to suggest. And frankly, 90% of the load tests happen from a single box. Going nuclear is not happening that often.