Stress testing

There are policies built around Amazon customers who plan on using some type of high-volume testing to test against the reliability and durability of their systems, networks, and products. In this case, often customers may want to ensure that web servers hosted on an EC2 instance can withstand large amounts of traffic. Stress testing, which can also at times be called load testing, or gameplay testing, can also ensure that if traffic becomes too much for the web server, the traffic is then redirected by a load balancer. For a high-level view of load balancing, please refer to Figure 11.4.

Why stress test?

As mentioned, we execute a stress test to ensure that the target environment can take on the high amount of traffic that may be expected while the system is in production.

Important note

A production server will typically be accessible on the web and will ensure large amounts of traffic from legitimate and non-legitimate sources.

Load testing, or stress...