In this episode, Scott Moore interviews Stephane Landelle, CTO of Gatling. They talk about the new Gatling Studio and the problems it solves for the developers and performance engineers.
🚀 Gatling Studio:
For those familiar with the world of software engineering, you know that performance is paramount. We frequently discuss tuning, monitoring, observability, and optimization. We’ve covered a lot of load testing tools on the show, but we haven’t dedicated a full segment to Gatling until now. Their new release, Gatling Studio aims to solve critical industry problems and make the developer experience better, alongside that of the performance engineer, ensuring software deployment is smoother and faster.
💡 A Decade of “Test as Code”: The Gatling Philosophy
We recently spoke with Stephane Landelle, the creator of Gatling and CTO of the company behind the project. He shared that Gatling has been developed for over a decade, utilizing an open-core model that offers both an open source version and an enterprise suite. The core philosophy of Gatling has always been “test as code,” a concept that was quite revolutionary at its inception but aligns perfectly with today’s “everything as code” movement.
Stephane himself wasn’t a performance engineer; he was a tech leader who, over ten years ago, struggled with the complexities of load testing. In the pre-DevOps era, load tests were often conducted late in the development lifecycle by a centralized, “black box” team. This created friction and communication challenges. He wanted his developer teams to be able to investigate performance issues earlier and on their own terms. Since developers were already using IDEs, coding in languages like Java, and pushing to source control, they preferred a code-oriented solution over a clunky GUI click interface. This desire for a developer-centric, high-performance solution led to the creation of Gatling. Initially written in Scala using the high-performance Actor model (via Akka), Gatling was born with the explicit mission to improve the developer experience and reduce friction in software deployment.
🌍 Expanding the Language Ecosystem
While Gatling originated in Scala, the team recognized that developers needed flexibility. For a long time, many only associated Gatling with Scala, but that is far from the case today. Gatling now offers a Java SDK, which has been available for five years, and a JavaScript/TypeScript SDK, released about a year and a half ago. These additions address a natural resistance to change and allow teams to stick to mainstream languages and familiar tooling. Stephane highlights that they now only recommend Scala for organizations where the Gatling users are already Scala developers. For everyone else, sticking to a mainstream language like Java or TypeScript is recommended for easier onboarding. The underlying SDKs are similar, making it easy for different teams to use different languages while still collaborating effectively.
✨ The Big Reveal: What is Gatling Studio?
The latest major release, Gatling Studio, addresses a significant pain point: testing applications that act as a black box (perhaps third-party software) or dealing with the complexity of proxy configuration, especially with HTTPS, which requires handling root certificates. Gatling Studio is a standalone application that leverages an actual browser-based solution, making the recording process simpler and more intuitive.
Gatling Studio aims to help existing Gatling users with test crafting and debugging, while simultaneously onboarding new users through a more guided workflow. The demo showcased a seamless process:
- Record a Journey: An embedded Chrome window captures a typical user journey (e.g., browsing a product, adding to a cart, checking out).
- Automatic Scenario Generation: The recording is instantly converted into a scenario, with static resources excluded and natural user pauses captured.
- Export Project: The scenario is exported as a fully functional, ready-to-run load test project, complete with all necessary configuration files and the simulation code (in your chosen SDK, e.g., Java).
This desktop application provides a user interface that moves beyond the IDE for the initial crafting and debugging phase, opening the door for future powerful features like automatic correlations, better data injection capabilities, and comparison of generated traffic versus recorded traffic.
🔮 The Future Vision: A Performance Engineering Platform
The release of Gatling Studio is just the beginning. The vision for the next year is to evolve from simply a load testing tool into a comprehensive performance engineering solution and platform. Future features include an embedded AI agent to assist with correlation advice, injection profile tuning, and test result analysis. AI is poised to help analyze the massive amounts of data generated by tests, moving beyond simply providing dashboards of charts and metrics. The goal is to provide non-expert users with automatic analysis to quickly figure out where performance issues lie. This includes checking the health of load generators and identifying problematic requests that need APM investigation.
The company is also focused on helping with the full performance test workflow, enabling structured campaigns to repeatedly iterate on tests and compare results over time. This includes monitoring dashboards for overall load testing activity, providing managers with a clear state of performance testing across different teams.
✅ Take the Next Step
If you’re a developer or performance engineer looking to streamline your load testing process, we highly encourage you to check out the new Gatling Studio. It’s a powerful step forward in making load testing a natural part of the modern development workflow.
You can find out more and download the application on their website at gatling.io. And as a developer community, they encourage feedback on GitHub to help refine the product, especially around corporate network configurations. They are eager to hear if they’re heading in the right direction!
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