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*Cross-posted on the* Cloud Native Computing Foundation blog. Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Linkerd as its fifth hosted project, alongside Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing and Fluentd. Linkerd is an open source, resilient service mesh for cloud-native applications. Created by Buoyant founders William Morgan and Oliver Gould in 2015, Linkerd builds upon Finagle, the scalable microservice library that powers companies like Twitter, Soundcloud, Pinterest and ING.

Linkerd, our service mesh for cloud-native applications, needs to handle very high volumes of production traffic over extended periods of time. In this post, we’ll describe the load testing strategies and tools we use to ensure Linkerd can meet this goal. We’ll review some of the problems we faced when trying to use popular load testers. Finally, we’ll introduce slow_cooker, an open source load tester written in Go, which is designed for long-running load tests and lifecycle issue identification.