Traffic replay is quickly gaining traction as the best way to recreate production scenarios.

Organizations are starting to realize that simply writing tests to generate traffic is simply not good enough. Rather, production traffic replication is now necessary, where you record traffic from your production environment and then replay it in your development environment. To match the modern principles of this testing methodology, it makes sense to also utilize modern infrastructure, like Kubernetes. Some benefits of using Kubernetes for production traffic replication are the ability to: Additionally, load generators are ephemeral. These reasons-and a few more besides-will be covered later in this post, but let's first take a deeper look at what production traffic replication is.

In an ideal world, you want to have precisely the capacity to manage the requests of your users, from peak periods to off-peak hours. If you need three servers to attend to all the requests at peak periods and just one server at off-peak hours, running three servers all the time is going to drive up expenses, and running just one server all the time is going to mean that during peak periods, your systems will be overwhelmed and some clients will be denied service.

Have you ever experienced the problem where your code is broken in production, but everything runs correctly in your dev environment? This can be really challenging because you have limited information once something is in production, and you can't easily make changes and try different code. Speedscale production data simulation lets you securely capture the production application traffic, normalize the data, and replay it directly in your dev environment. There are a lot of challenges with trying to replicate the production environment in non-prod.