Using CI/CD pipelines to spot performance problems

There is no better time to do performance testing than during an automated CI/CD pipeline. With performance tests, you want them to be routine and against a stable unchanging environment or deployment. If you run performance tests against an environment or deployment that constantly changes, you will not have reliable results. Without reliable results, the entire notion of performance tests goes out the window. You want to understand how your changes affect your performance; without stable results, you can’t infer that understanding.

With GitLab, there are multiple ways to run performance tests. For web or API-based deployments, GitLab includes a native performance tool that will cover in this chapter and go over its integration. However, you, the end user, can take this a step further and cover more metrics such as CPU/memory/storage usage in a CI/CD pipeline. We will not be covering how to collect these metrics in this...