If you haven’t taken AppHarbor for a test drive, you should. While you’re there, check out the various 3^rd party add-ons. Without fail, they are useful, easy to use, and have free usage tiers that allow you to do interesting things without divulging your credit card number. This is how I stumbled upon Blitz.io.

What is Blitz?

Load testing is a strange addiction to develop but many would be load testing junkies are turned off by the complexities of simply hammering a server with a bunch of requests. Blitz.io makes this as easy as clicking a button. Seriously. Within seconds, you can have an army of load agents at your disposal, ready to pound your servers from Amazon’s public cloud.

What will Blitz.io do for me?

Glad you asked. Blitz isn’t going to solve all of your performance problems. In fact, it’s beauty lies in its simplicity, so don’t expect an “enterprise” product with thousands of features. However, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve used it to: 

• Verify my basic CDN configuration is working
• Verify my load balancer is working as expected
• Verify my application cache performance is decent
• Verify application performance is tolerable in general
• Find and fix a performance issue

What Blitz hasn’t done for me:

• Collected perf counters from my server – you should be doing this anyway, right?
• Told me how to fix my problems  

Blitz makes load testing fun

As odd as it sounds, watching production servers sweat as they get pummeled by Blitz is pretty entertaining. One of my new office past times involves having Blitz on one monitor and Splunk on another and watching how well the latest build performs in production.  The Blitz UI is easy on the eyes. See the screenshot below. Better yet, take 5 minutes and try it out yourself.

To know my account balance in 5 seconds or less. Seriously. 

My billing statements from AWS and Azure arrived in my inbox a mere 9 minutes apart today. That's sort of uncanny. Here's what the first two seconds of my Amazon email look like:

Greetings from Amazon Web Services,

This e-mail confirms that your latest billing statement is available on the AWS web site. Your account will be charged the following:

Total: $4.18

 

I actually dread getting the Azure email. Why? I get a bunch of free Azure stuff via an MSDN subscription (+1 Azure), but I'm always paranoid that I'll leave something on and get charged a lot (actual been there and done that with AWS, -1 Amazon). Forgetting to turn stuff off is not anobody's fault but mine (a reminder email would be nice, though). What really peeves me is this:

Dear Bryan Wheeler,

Your Microsoft Online Services statement is ready.

To view your statement:

1. Sign in to the Microsoft Online Services Customer Portal with the following Windows Live ID: foo@bar.com
2. On the Home page, click View my bills.

Now I have to burn 5 minutes remembering how to find my account balance in the Online Services Customer Portal. Grrrr. Please, please, please Azure Santa Claus. Send me my account balance in the email.