by @Jean Louw

What is k6?

k6 is an open-source load testing tool that makes performance testing productive and easy for developers. It was created in 2016 by the team at Load Impact (now Grafana Labs) to address the need for a more efficient and developer-friendly tool compared to existing options.

k6 supports testing of APIs, microservices, and websites, and can generate high loads with minimal resources. It integrates well with modern development workflows and tools.

Some key facts about k6:

• It was inspired by the need for a better developer experience in load testing
• The k6 mascot, Bert, is named after a mischievous alligator that escaped from the early k6 office a few times
• Over 300 companies use k6, including Microsoft, Gitlab, Postman, and Codecademy
• It has over 18k stars on GitHub and an active open source community

Why use k6?

There are several benefits that make k6 an attractive choice for load testing:

1. Developer-centric: k6 caters to the developer experience. Tests are written in JavaScript, a familiar language for most developers. This enables teams to create more realistic and maintainable tests.
2. Open source: As an open source tool, k6 is free to use and benefits from community contributions and extensions. This keeps it up-to-date and ensures it can integrate with many other tools.
3. High performance: k6 is optimized for efficiency and can simulate high loads even with constrained resources. This allows more thorough testing earlier in development.
4. Modern architecture: k6 was built from the ground up for modern development practices like CI/CD, microservices, and cloud infrastructure. It fits naturally into those workflows.
5. Flexible scripting: By using JavaScript, k6 enables flexible and dynamic test scripting to model complex user behaviors and scenarios. Tests can incorporate test data, parameters, and flows.
6. Integrations: k6 can integrate results with many tools like Grafana, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, and more for analysis and visualization. It also has extensions to enhance its capabilities.

Some key advantages over alternative tools:

• More efficient resource usage for high loads compared to Apache JMeter
• Simpler and more flexible scripting compared to Locust and Gatling