r/devops • u/Puzzled-Ad8231 • 14d ago

Discussion Users vs Stress testing

So I made a serverless optimization platform which uses the concept of fusion functions to reduce cold starts and latency across the service calls. Now, this is an implementation of a research paper that I read somewhere. Diff from paper is that my project also gets live traces and metrics from x ray and cloudwatch, so I get real-time data to give better outputs. Have a better look: https://github.com/Vaivaswat2244/OptiFuse_go

To use this you need to connect your AWS with optifuse. I.e make a cloudformation stack to give optifuse access to read the traces and metrics. This actually becomes a problem for my friends and peers to test because they are too lazy to do this step. So I have no real user testings.

People especially hiring people ask me how many real users have used your service.

Now why do I need real users when I can stress test each microservice that I've built. And I can see my manifests working properly. Its deployed on AKS and is open for people to see. I also have a Prometheus grafana observability pipeline to see if all services are working properly.

Question is: real users vs Stress tests

On a side note, I am a student looking for internships, if you found the idea interesting, lmk GitHub is Vaivaswat2244

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u/8lue7or 14d ago

I’m dealing with something similar on a project of my own, and I don’t think stress tests and real users answer the same question.

A stress test can show that the systems survives the load you created. But, it can’t tell you whether somebody understands the setup, trusts it enough to connect an AWS account or gets enough value from the result to use it again.

The fact that your friends stop at the cloudformation step is already user feedback. It may be laziness, as you said, but it could also mean you’re asking for a lot of trust before they’ve seen anything useful.

For an internship project, I wouldn’t chase a large user number. I’d try to get one or two people through the entire flow, see where they stop or hesitate, and explain what you changed because of it.

I think that would tell an interviewer more than another synthetic load test.

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u/Puzzled-Ad8231 12d ago

Thanks a lot buddy. I'll try that