When Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1 shipped in early December, we announced our plans to deprecate the load test functionality in Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2019 will be the last version of Visual Studio with web performance and load test features.
Load testing helps you ensure that your apps can scale and do not go down when peak traffic hits. Although we have been shipping our load testing tools and our cloud-based load testing service for many years, unlike our other services their adoption has not been growing. While it is difficult for me to pinpoint one specific reason for this, there are a few contributing factors, including:
- Load testing is typically initiated for seasonal events such as tax filing season, Black Friday, Christmas, summer sales, etc. The classic example I always like to give is the NORAD Santa Tracker
- Load testing requires a certain level of expertise to ensure you have confidence in the results. This ranges from understanding the application & deployment architecture, designing of load tests, authoring/executing of tests at scale and analyzing the results to identify performance and application bottlenecks.
- We’ve found that very few organizations rely on in-house expertise for this. Instead, most prefer to engage consultants to help them.
Shutting down the cloud-based load testing service: Our cloud-based load testing service will continue to run through March 31st, 2020. You can continue to use all the experiences powered by this service without interruption until then. After the service goes offline, you can continue to use the tests as outlined below while you evaluate alternatives.
Load testing Alternatives
There are many alternatives, both free and commercial tools that you can consider. For instance, Apache JMeter is a free, popular open source tool with a strong community backing. It supports many different protocols and has rich extensibility that can be leveraged to customize the tool to your needs. Many commercial services such as Blazemeter support running Apache JMeter tests.
If you use code based tests for load testing and .NET is your platform of choice then tools such as Neoload, Micro Focus Silk Performer and Micro Focus Load Runner are options to consider.
In addition, extensions from several load test vendors such as SOASTA (now Akamai CloudTest), Apica Loadtest and Load Impact are available in the Azure DevOps and Azure marketplace.
