Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Holiday readiness: run your first load test with skills

Before you can answer whether checkout will survive Black Friday, you need a test you can rerun. In this demo, we used a coding agent and the Speedscale skills to record a Node app, mock its downstream API, and run a 30-second load test with 10 virtual users. That’s a small first step in holiday readiness. It gives you a working test and a result to inspect, with time left to fix what you find before a code freeze.

Load Test PostgreSQL Instantly using Production Recordings

The first PostgreSQL post ran on a laptop: a demo app, a Docker container, and the proxymock CLI. That is the fastest way to see the idea. It is also not where your database problems live. Your real query mix lives in the cluster, where a Java service with a connection pool, an ORM and a schema migration tool sends the statements nobody wrote by hand. This post deploys an open source banking app to Kubernetes and records the queries one of its services sends to PostgreSQL.

Test Your MySQL 8.4 Upgrade With Real App Queries

Before you start, paste this into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Kiro, or any assistant that can read a URL and run commands: The install-speedscale skill installs proxymock for your operating system and walks you through proxymock init. It stops when you need to complete browser sign-in, keeps your recordings on your machine, and connects the proxymock MCP server so your assistant can run the prompts later in this article.

Test PostgreSQL With the Queries Your App Actually Runs

The first number from my local PostgreSQL 16 test was roughly 1,600 statements per second. It looked impressive. It was also the least useful result in the run. The useful part was the workload. It came from queries the demo app had actually sent: the same prepared statements, parameters, reads and writes. A synthetic benchmark tells you how PostgreSQL handles a synthetic workload. It does not tell you whether your migration just broke the UPDATE your app depends on.

$4.48 a Gallon: Your Holiday Checkout Is the New Mall

Remember when “going shopping” meant getting in the car? This fall, filling the tank feels like applying for a small loan. U.S. regular gasoline averaged about $4.48 a gallon for the week of September 21, 2026. A round trip to the store starts competing with free shipping. And free shipping never needs a parking spot. That doesn’t tell us how many shoppers will move online this holiday season.

How Will Software Engineers Interface with AI in the Future? aicoding #devops #techdebate #aiagents

A breakdown of the three potential ways software engineers will interact with AI coding assistants, ranging from local desktop setups to fully automated software delivery factories. Learn more: speedscale.com.
Sponsored Post

Synthetic Monitoring Is Broken. Your Production Traffic Can Fix It.

Synthetic monitoring has been a critical part of application reliability for years. It gives engineering and operations teams a way to proactively test applications, APIs, and critical customer journeys before users encounter problems. But there is a fundamental limitation with the traditional approach: Someone has to create the tests. As applications become more distributed and customer journeys become more complex, organizations can end up maintaining hundreds or even thousands of synthetic scripts. Every new feature, API, dependency, or change to a customer journey can require another update.