New Relic : Combine load testing and observability with Speedscale and New Relic One

The traditional method for load testing requires a ton of steps: writing test cases, building non-prod environments, populating data, creating third-party API sandboxes, running tests, and reviewing reports. This is not a new struggle, and it's why software development teams have avoided load and integration testing in the past. Concepts like service virtualization came along in the early 2000s and brought some relief, but building mock services takes an enormous amount of time, and these concepts were designed for a previous generation of technology. As a result, they can be missing modern protocols and support for Kubernetes, containers, and other cloud native technologies.

Today, with more than 1,000 different CNCF landscape technologies, development teams quickly build applications from numerous open source projects and rapidly push them into production, working in continuous integration (CI) environments. We need a new approach to scale testing, so it's easier to gain confidence in how code will perform in real-word scenarios.

In this blog post, I'll show you why my cofounders and I created Speedscale and how the Speedscale quickstart visualizes traffic replay data into New Relic One dashboards so you can compare it with your telemetry data.

The Speedscale story

Balancing the age-old struggle of speed with quality is something near and dear to our Speedscale hearts. Just a couple of years ago, Matt LeRay, Nate Lee, and I launched Speedscale with the goal of finally solving this dilemma for cloud native applications.

We really stepped back and considered our combined experiences in software development, quality assurance, service virtualization, and application monitoring (through the prism of a shared Georgia Tech value of innovation). We were part of the YCombinater Summer 2020 batch and publicly announced the launch on Hackernews. And we've been running full speed ahead ever since.

The solution: Speedscale traffic replay

Thanks to advances in cloud data warehousing, we can take a new approach to application performance by replaying previous traffic against new builds of code. Known as traffic replay, this approach means you can test applications using real traffic before you put them into production.

The real production system is messy and includes things like health checks, clients who do not upgrade their SDKs, and garbage data flowing in. With Speedscale traffic replay, teams can build enormous sets of test automation with the click of a button. And since it's hard to provision the environment properly for these test scenarios, service mocks will automatically provide the right data for third-party APIs, and you can run it in your own containers.