A load testing tool for APIs and services. Testkube can run Artillery scripts in Kubernetes environments.
Table of Contents
What Does Artillery Mean?
Artillery is an open-source load testing framework designed for modern APIs and backend services. It allows developers and QA teams to simulate real-world traffic patterns against HTTP, WebSocket, and Socket.io endpoints to validate performance, reliability, and scalability.
Why Artillery Matters
Applications today must handle thousands or even millions of requests per second. Without proactive load testing, bottlenecks or outages can surface only in production. Artillery helps teams:
Identify performance limits and latency issues.
Validate how systems respond under stress or spikes in traffic.
Ensure APIs and services scale before customer-facing failures occur.
Common Use Cases
Testing REST or GraphQL APIs under realistic load.
Validating WebSocket and real-time services.
Running stress tests before new feature releases.
Simulating peak traffic during seasonal or promotional events.
How Artillery Works with Testkube
Testkube integrates Artillery into Kubernetes-native workflows by running scripts inside the cluster environment. This ensures:
Accurate results that reflect cluster-level scaling and networking.
Centralized reporting and artifact storage for each execution.
Seamless CI/CD automation to trigger Artillery tests on every deployment.
Real-World Example
A retail company preparing for Black Friday uses Artillery to simulate 50,000 concurrent shoppers hitting their checkout API. Running these tests inside Kubernetes with Testkube ensures realistic conditions that match production infrastructure, allowing the team to fix scaling issues before customers are impacted.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Artillery FAQ
Artillery supports HTTP, HTTPS, WebSocket, Socket.io, and can be extended with plugins for other protocols.
Yes. Artillery is open source, with a community edition freely available. There is also a Pro version with additional enterprise features.
Yes. With Testkube, Artillery scripts can run natively inside Kubernetes clusters, providing accurate load simulations that reflect production conditions.
Artillery is lightweight and easy to script in YAML or JavaScript. JMeter offers a broader plugin ecosystem but can be heavier to run. k6 emphasizes JavaScript scripting and strong developer experience. Testkube supports all three, giving teams flexibility.
Yes. Artillery tests can be automated in CI/CD pipelines, and with Testkube, they can run on every build or deployment to provide constant performance validation.
Scripts are typically written in YAML or JavaScript. They define scenarios such as number of virtual users, request patterns, and expected responses.
By default, Artillery runs on a single machine, but when executed with Testkube inside Kubernetes, you can scale horizontally across pods for massive distributed load.
Artillery reports on latency, throughput, request rates, error rates, and percentile-based response times (p50, p95, p99). With Testkube, results are centralized and stored for trend analysis.
Yes. Artillery can run in most CI/CD environments, and Testkube makes it easier by providing Kubernetes-native integration with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, ArgoCD, and others.
Yes. Artillery supports sending GraphQL queries and mutations as part of load scenarios, making it useful for modern API-driven applications.
Yes. Artillery scenarios allow you to configure ramp-up times, spike testing, and user journeys that reflect actual usage patterns.
Artillery itself is lightweight, running on Node.js. For large-scale tests, Kubernetes with Testkube provides elastic infrastructure to generate higher loads.
Related Terms and Concepts
Load Testing
Testing a system’s performance under high user load. Testkube supports load testing tools like k6 or JMeter in Kubernetes.
