(intentionally didn’t give this post a title)
Azure Easter Egg –Load Testing from the portal
While my “day” job continues to be the Community Lead for the ALM teams…my manager has asked me to take on an “evening” role of helping the Load Test Team integrate load testing directly into the new Azure portal.
I immediately agreed –and I learned two things:
- My skills as a feature PM weren’t natural (read -i need to grow here).
- Good Software Design is hard.
…but Luckily I have a great peer group to help mentor me. -And from my other posts and presentations i am firm advocate of testing in production.
As you can imagine this isn’t without some downsides…such as in-flight features leaking into the production. …and enabling this blog post<g>
While all of these features were supposed to be hidden, due to a miscommunication (probably my fault as a nascent feature PM<g>) one of the discovery routes went live in the last deployment. While we aren’t quite ready for the SLA’s the Azure platform mandates we are certainly ready for the people that read my blog (guessing about a dozen people including my mom and a handful of MVPs) to give it a whirl.
To get started:
1. Open your Azure Subscription
2. Navigate to Web Apps
3. Open any Web App…If you don’t have one you can just add one
4. Right click on the space between any of the tiles and select “Add Tiles”
5. In the Tile Gallery choose the Operations category
6. Drag and drop the Cloud Load Test Tile to the to Web App blade displayed to the right of the Tile Gallery.
7. Select the “Done” tile in the upper left corner
8. Click on the Load Test Tile to bring up the Load Test Manager. Since this is the first time the Load Test Manager has opened the only real option is click “New Load Test”
9. The first option is your Visual Studio Online Account…
10. If do not know the name of your Visual Studio Online account you can find it by going to Home the Browse and select “Team Project”
11. You will see this subscription only has one Account with several Team Projects
12. You can also easily create a Visual Studio Team Project; select New>Developer Services>Team Project (These are free to create so if you don’t want to use your companies VSO accounts this is a good alternative)
13. This Team Project create experience will require a new team project name and an Account name/URL…you can see the account name/URL, i have called it Mynewvsoaccount
14. Now going back to the the Load Test Tile (see steps 1-9) we can fill in the first option requiring a Visual Studio Online Account.
Also worth mentioning while we are in an Azure Web App you can load test any internet accessible URL…in the example below I am referencing http://www.bing.com
15. Selecting the Load Test run you have created you can see the data coming in, in real time.
You can also create additional load tests while others are running…As matter of fact it is likely you will want to do this to test additional pages.
16. Clearly we don’t plan on forcing everyone to add a new tile if they want to use this new feature. At public preview Load Test will show up under All Settings for Web Apps.
For the dozens of people that read my blog you an get this experience now by using the Azure feature flag:
?websitesextension_cloudloadtest=true
