Hi there,
Here at k6, we’re constantly shipping new features to help our users get the most out of k6. In case you missed it, here’s a roundup of all the k6 and k6 Cloud news, updates, and improvements you should know about.
🙌 v0.40.0 released
k6 v0.40.0 is here! With this release, k6 provides “early access” to new experimental modules for WebSocket API, Redis, and timers—xk6 no longer required for these modules! Updates to the underlying Goja scripting engine now provides first-class support for JavaScript classes. Several bug fixes and refactorings also pave the way for future features noted in the roadmap.
Warning: There were breaking changes made to some undocumented and unintentional edge behaviors. See Breaking changes for details.
As always, the full list of features and fixes may be found in the Release Notes.
✨ New in k6 Cloud
Audit Trail provides valuable insights into security-related events and user activities.
Teams is an optional structural unit between Organizations and Projects and helps admins manage application access.
The new Analysis Panel allows you to:
- Configure charts using multiple metrics
- Customize colors, labels, and plot types
- Easily filter metrics by tag
- Reuse your chart’s configuration between test runs
Last but not least, there are a few exciting enhancements in the k6 Cloud app for Grafana. Users can now create new and update existing tests directly from the app using the script editor and add dynamic dashboard variables to easily switch between test runs without editing the panel's query. Learn more.
🌐 New in xk6-browser
xk6-browser is our extension which brings browser automation and end-to-end web testing to k6 while supporting core k6 features. It adds browser-level scripting APIs to interact with real browsers and collect frontend metrics as part of your k6 tests.
The latest release of xk6-browser v0.5.0 includes:
- Combining key presses when inputting text in an input field now works with the Shift modifier key.
- ElementHandle.click() and Page.waitForNavigation() are now asynchronous APIs.
- chromium is now an importable object, which changes the syntax for launching tests.
- Bug fixes in relation to race conditions when navigating and waiting on a page.
- Log messages improvements.
- pprof server added and enabled by an environment variable to help us debug live.
You can view the full release notes here - xk6-browser version 0.5.0.
As part of this release, we have also updated our xk6-browser documentation to bring them up to date with the breaking changes that were introduced in this release. We’ve also added more description and examples on how to use our Browser and BrowserContext API. We’ll continue to add more documentation in the future.
⚙️ New in k6 Extensions
xk6-websockets, xk6-redis, and xk6-timers received significant improvements and have been promoted to k6 as experimental modules.
xk6-kubernetes added some bugfixes and upgraded the version of the kube-client. Related work has been done to the k6-chaos JavaScript library for conducting experiments in Kubernetes.
xk6-output-influxdb, xk6-output-timescaledb, and xk6-output-prometheus-remote are getting some updates for the included Grafana dashboards.
From the community…
xk6-kafka had significant improvements made over the last cycle. Developer Advocates Nicole van der Hoeven and Paul Balogh spoke with the author Mostafa Moradian during an episode of k6 Office Hours if you’d like to learn more.
New extensions have been appearing on our radar including xk6-imap, xk6-ethereum, xk6-git, xk6-smtp, and xk6-temporal to name a few.
It appears our friends at apideck released v1.8.4 of their postman-to-k6.
To our community of extension developers…we see you and thank you!!!
📣 Live from New York, it's ObservabilityCon 2022!
ObservabilityCON is back and will be an in-person event for the first time this year! From Nov. 1-2, we’ll be in New York City, where you'll have the opportunity to attend workshops or sessions led by experts and core maintainers of Grafana, Prometheus, Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo, Grafana Mimir, Grafana k6, and everything else you love in the open source observability ecosystem.
Seating is extremely limited, so sign up to get notifications for when in-person event registration opens to access early bird pricing, learn about the venue, and get a first look at the agenda.
Sign up for ObservabilityCON updates
🗞️ Must-reads
- Learning JavaScript through load test scripts (k6 blog)
- You can’t just buy a nine (k6 blog)
- Distributed load testing with k6 (empathy.co’s engineering blog)
- Test KEDA autoscaling with k6 (DevOps Toolkit video)
- Most recent k6 Office Hours covering topics such as load testing Apache Kafka with k6, resilience and chaos testing, and browser testing.
Happy testing!
-The k6 team