Better Load Testing with AWS Instance Tagging

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Better Load Testing with AWS Instance Tagging

Amazon AWS tagging capability is powerful and yet little used in load testing. Redline13 has supported AWS instance tagging for years. RedLine13 has now increased the number of tags to give you more control and better load testing with AWS instance Tagging.

We previously wrote about RedLine13 support for AWS Instance Tagging where you can create your own tags. But first, let’s talk about what tags are and how they can be used.

Using Tags

AWS has a User’s Guide: Tagging Your Amazon EC2 Resources. This explains how it helps you “manage your instances, images, and other Amazon EC2 resources”. It also says that you can “optionally assign your own metadata to each resource in the form of tags. This topic describes tags and shows you how to create them.”

Tag example and Load Testing with AWS Instance Tagging

RedLine13 supports the ability to create your own custom tags. The tag limit for free accounts has increased from one to two. And now RedLine13 has increased the tag limit to 10 for all paid accounts (Basic, Pro and Enterprise).

You can use EC2 tags for many things. They can help you group instances in the AWS console, run cost reports based on tags, set up AWS permissions based on the tags, and much more. Some users use them to tag resources by environment and type and then use that to run appropriate server updates on the right instances.

How Users Are Load Testing with AWS Instance Tagging

Antonio Gomes Rodrigues of SeLoger, and author of the new book Master Apache JMeter From load testing to DevOps, explains they benefit from using tags for load testing:

It allows us to have a more precise control of the EC2 instance. For examples:

  • To control the accurate price (we have AWS discount price) by applications (and not only by load test)
  • To avoid that AWS Lambda does something, such as stop EC2 instance during the night, in EC2 Redline13 injector
  • To avoid monitoring EC2 RedLine13 injector by Dynatrace and Datadog (Redline13 already do it) and paid for it

RedLine13 gives you better load testing with AWS instance Tagging. Check it out and run your own test on RedLine13.