Backend

The backend consists of a container image pipeline and load testing engine you use to generate load for the tests. You interact with the backend through the front end. Additionally, Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate tasks launched for each test are tagged with a unique test identifier (ID). These test ID tags can be used to help you monitor costs for this solution. For additional information, refer to User-Defined Cost Allocation Tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.

Container image pipeline

This solution uses a container image built with Amazon Linux 2023 as the base image with the Taurus load testing framework installed. Taurus is an open-source test automation framework that supports JMeter, K6, Locust, and other testing tools. AWS hosts this image in an Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) public repository. The solution uses this image to run tasks in the Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate cluster.

For more information, refer to the Container image customization section of this guide.

Testing infrastructure

In addition to the main CloudFormation template, the solution provides a regional template to launch the required resources for running tests in multiple Regions. The solution stores this template in Amazon S3 and provides a link to it in the web console. Each regional stack includes a VPC, an AWS Fargate cluster, and a Lambda function for processing live data.

For more information on how to deploy testing infrastructure in additional Regions, refer to the Multi-Region deployment section of this guide.

Load testing engine

The Distributed Load Testing solution uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate to simulate thousands of concurrent users across multiple Regions, generating HTTP requests at a sustained rate.

You define the test parameters using the included web console. The solution uses these parameters to generate a JSON test scenario and stores it in Amazon S3. For more information about test scripts and testing parameters, refer to Test types in this section.

An AWS Step Functions state machine runs and monitors Amazon ECS tasks in an AWS Fargate cluster. The AWS Step Functions state machine includes an ecr-checker AWS Lambda function, a task-status-checker AWS Lambda function, a task-runner AWS Lambda function, a task-canceler AWS Lambda function, and a results-parser AWS Lambda function. For more information on the workflow, refer to the Test workflow section of this guide. For more information on test results, refer to the Test results section of this guide. For more information on the test cancellation workflow, refer to the Test cancellation workflow section of this guide.

If you select live data, the solution initiates a real-time-data-publisher Lambda function in each Region by the CloudWatch logs that correspond to the Fargate tasks in that Region. The solution then processes and publishes the data to a topic in AWS IoT Core within the Region where you launched the main stack. For more information, refer to the Live data section of this guide.