Fast and Easy Traffic Mirroring and SLO Validation with Iter8

Iterate is a tool for load testing, A/B testing, and SLO validation of HTTP and gRPC services that can be used locally or within a Kubernetes cluster. It also supports custom metrics and tasks, and can be extended for use in CI/CD pipelines.

• Iterate is a tool for load testing, A/B testing, and SLO validation of HTTP and gRPC services
• It can be used locally or within a Kubernetes cluster
• It supports custom metrics and tasks
• It can be extended for use in CI/CD pipelines

The speaker demonstrated how to use Iterate to load test an HTTP service and validate its SLOs. The tool generated requests to the service and collected metrics on latency and errors, which were then validated against defined SLOs. The speaker also showed how to use Iterate with traffic mirroring and custom metrics to collect metrics from Istio.

Traffic mirroring, also known as shadowing, is a method of testing your releases with real-world traffic without impacting end users. Using real-world traffic has many advantages over using synthetic traffic or using historical data by mimicking real-world usage. Service meshes like Istio make it possible to mirror traffic and automatically collect latency and error-related metrics in Prometheus for the mirrored traffic using a dark launched version of the service. In this session, we show how you can set up a traffic mirroring and SLO validation experiment in minutes in a simple no-code declarative way using Iter8 (https://iter8.tools) — the flexible and powerful open source Kubernetes release optimizer.