Hold My Beer - Load Testing. In Production. On Autopilot.
summary
Outbrain runs production load tests automatically for eight years using a homegrown service called Tulatar load test automation Runner that shifts real user traffic across data centers in warm maintain and cool steps and integrates with Slack for interactive commands. Tests increase frequency fourfold to ~8/month, cut ~15 engineer hours per test cycle to nearly zero, and use a traffic lights method for auto-abort/pause based on profit-impacting KPIs. The system stores run metrics for capacity planning and anomaly comparison.
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chapters (29)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:53Outbrain’s scale and operations
- 3:56Load testing principles
- 4:38Production vs test environments
- 7:25Costs and benefits of production tests
- 8:29Target traffic calculation
- 10:35Manual testing challenges
- 11:36Automating with Tulatar Runner
- 13:21Automated execution and scheduling
- 14:26Optimal test timing
- 15:07Health checks and steps
- 16:10Traffic shifting and warm-up
- 16:52Maintaining high traffic
- 17:55Cooling down and risks
- 18:16Distributed ownership
- 19:19Traffic light alerts
- 20:22Direct architecture checks
- 21:26Slack integration
- 22:10Automated alert handling example
- 23:15Automation outcomes
- 25:23Cultural shift
- 26:28Empowering teams
- 27:08Data-driven decisions
- 28:12Lotus comparison
- 28:54Hardware planning
- 29:57Kubernetes capacity
- 30:40Scaling automation
- 31:22Handling failures
- 32:06Conclusion
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