PERF01-BP06 Use benchmarking to drive architectural decisions

Benchmark the performance of an existing workload to understand how it performs on the cloud and drive architectural decisions based on that data.

Common anti-patterns:

Benefits of establishing this best practice: Benchmarking your current implementation allows you to measure performance improvements.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium

Implementation guidance

Use benchmarking with synthetic tests to assess how your workload’s components perform. Benchmarking is generally quicker to set up than load testing and is used to evaluate the technology for a particular component. Benchmarking is often used at the start of a new project, when you lack a full solution to load test.

You can either build your own custom benchmark tests or use an industry standard test, such as TPC-DS, to benchmark your workloads. Industry benchmarks are helpful when comparing environments. Custom benchmarks are useful for targeting specific types of operations that you expect to make in your architecture.

When benchmarking, it is important to pre-warm your test environment to get valid results. Run the same benchmark multiple times to verify that you’ve captured any variance over time.

Because benchmarks are generally faster to run than load tests, they can be used earlier in the deployment pipeline and provide faster feedback on performance deviations. When you evaluate a significant change in a component or service, a benchmark can be a quick way to see if you can justify the effort to make the change. Using benchmarking in conjunction with load testing is important because load testing informs you about how your workload performs in production.

Implementation steps

Resources

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