Load Testing a AWS hosted Radio Station

Question

I'm a bit new with testing but have got a project to test the hosted radio station for load, so we can see what are the current limits.

The station is hosted on AWS, it's using third-party software that handles everything, but we don't know what is the limit for the listeners, we got an idea to simulate the listeners via the bot, but we don't want to seem like we are trying to create a botnet attack, so we gave up from that idea.

I found that AWS has its own software that handles load testing, but I'm not familiar with it all.

Want to see what an experienced engineer would do in this situation and what is the best approach here, and where should I start.

Answer 1

It looks like you need to perform a stress test

Example steps I would take:

1. Assess which network protocol(s) is(are) in scope, i.e. how the streaming is implemented
2. Choose a load testing tool which support this(these) protocol(s)
3. Implement test scenario by replicating the network footprint of the real user using a real browser (or an application) listening to the stream with 100% accuracy
4. Set up resources monitoring on the AWS side (i.e. AWS CloudWatch) to plot charts of CPU, RAM, Network, Disk usage and your application specific metrics if any
5. Start with 1 user and gradually increase the load until any of monitored parameters start exceeding reasonable threshold (i.e. 80% of total available capacity) or errors start occurring, whatever comes the first