Performance & Soak-Testing Platform Case Study
Client | Confidential
Engagement Overview
AJQ Technology built its own proprietary performance-testing platform, giving delivery teams enterprise-grade load and soak-testing capability without dependency on costly commercial tools, including a direct migration path for teams moving from other enterprise test platforms, importing existing test definitions straight into AJQ’s platform.
The platform captures real user flows, either as authored HTTP sequences or captured directly from a browser session, and executes them at scale using an open arrival-rate model that adds virtual users as needed to hold a target throughput, rather than the common industry pitfall of waiting on stalled iterations and silently under-reporting load. Every run is broken down into genuine network-level sub-timings (DNS, TCP, TLS handshake, time-to-first-byte, transfer) alongside browser performance vitals, giving engineering teams the same depth of diagnostic detail a dedicated APM tool would provide, purpose-built into the reporting layer.
Soak and endurance testing, sustained load over many hours, the class of testing that finds the failure modes short load tests never surface, is treated as a first-class capability, not simply “a load test with a large duration number.” The platform has been proven against a real client partner-integration environment, with concurrency progressively increased as the integration was validated, and has successfully executed and reported on genuine multi-hour soak runs.
Scope & Complexity
- An execution engine built on k6’s open/arrival-rate model, replacing a hand-rolled implementation with native, accurate network sub-timing capture
- Dual flow-authoring paths, using either hand-authored HTTP test flows, or flows captured directly from a real browser session for higher-fidelity user journeys
- An import path for existing enterprise test platforms, letting teams bring their current test definitions into AJQ’s platform rather than rebuilding from scratch
- Domain-level governance controls capping concurrency per target environment, with explicit, auditable sign-off required before limits are raised against a real partner or production-adjacent system
- Soak/endurance testing hardened through direct incident learning, where a genuine multi-hour production-volume soak test surfaced a status-reporting edge case, root-caused and fixed, then used to drive a deeper design pass on long-running test reliability
- JWT-based authentication with Microsoft Entra ID federated SSO gating the reporting console, and scheduled/recurring test runs with automated notifications on completion
Technologies & Tools
- k6 as the load-execution engine, orchestrated by AJQ’s own scheduling and reporting layer
- AWS ECS Fargate for isolated, on-demand load-generation tasks, in a fully segregated VPC with no shared resources or ingress
- API Gateway, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, and SQS for the control plane, results storage, and async processing
- Amazon EventBridge for scheduled/recurring test runs
- Amazon Cognito with Microsoft Entra ID federated SSO, JWT-authenticated API access
- Amazon SES for run start/finish notifications
- React, Vite, and Recharts-powered reporting console with waterfall views, browser vitals, and composite multi-run reporting
- Delivery Model & Ways of Working
Built and evolved by AJQ’s own platform team, with design decisions grounded in real production incidents rather than theory, the platform’s soak-testing design was directly shaped by root-causing a genuine long-running test’s edge case, not a hypothetical one. Execution-engine choices were validated through a structured build-vs-buy spike before commitment, confirming k6 adoption would retire the most fragile parts of the original engine while adding capability the client-facing reporting layer could already surface.
Access to real partner and production-adjacent environments is governed deliberately. Concurrency limits are raised only on explicit, documented approval as an integration is progressively proven safe to load-test further, reflecting the same disciplined, audit-first posture AJQ applies on regulated client engagements.
Outcomes Achieved
- A proprietary performance-testing capability reducing dependency on costly commercial tooling, with a direct migration path from other enterprise test platforms
- Genuine multi-hour soak tests executed and reported successfully against a real client partner-integration environment
- Rich, request-level network diagnostics (DNS/TCP/TLS/TTFB/transfer) built into every run’s report by default, depth of insight typically requiring separate APM tooling
- A governed, auditable path to safely increasing load against real partner and production-adjacent systems
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