Goad
Goad is an AWS Lambda powered, highly distributed,
load testing tool built in Go for the 2016 Gopher Gala.

Installation
Binary
The easiest way is to download a pre-built binary from Goad.io or from the GitHub Releases page.
From source
To build the Goad CLI from scratch, make sure you have a working Go 1.5 workspace (instructions), then:
- Fetch the project with
go get
:
go get github.com/gophergala2016/goad
- Install Go bindata:
go get -u github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata/...
- Run make to build for all supported platforms
make
Alternatively, run append osx
, linux
, or windows
to just build for one platform, for example:
make osx
- You'll find your
goad
binary in the build
folder…
Usage
AWS credentials
Goad will read your credentials from ~/.aws/credentials
or from the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
environment variables (more info).
CLI
# Get help:
$ goad -h
Usage of ./build/osx/x86-64/goad:
-c uint
number of concurrent requests (default 10)
-n uint
number of total requests to make (default 1000)
-r string
AWS region (default "us-east-1")
-t uint
request timeout in seconds (default 15)
# For example:
$ goad -n 1000 -c 5 https://example.com
How it works
Goad takes full advantage of the power of Amazon Lambdas for distributed load testing. You can use goad to launch HTTP loads from up to four AWS regions at once. Each lambda can handle hundreds of concurrent connections, we estimate that Goad should be able to achieve peak loads of up to 100,000 requests/second.

How it was built
Go CLI and server
Lambda workers
AWS Lambda instances are bootstrapped using node.js but the actual work on the Lambda instances is performed by a Go process. The HTTP
requests are distributed among multiple Lambda instances each running multiple concurrent goroutines, in order to achieve the desired
concurrency level with high throughput.
Because we we wanted to use React and ES6 to build the online demo, we opted to use a Node.js-based toolchain for the website. As far as we could tell, none of static site builders built with Go have built in support for an asset pipeline that would support ES6 modules out of the box or even easily…
We use WebSockets and React to present the results of the demo load test every few seconds as more results come in.
As we wanted to prevent the site from being used as a DDoS tool, the online demo is very limited but hopefully enough to demonstrate the usefulness of the CLI version of Goad.
License & Copyright
MIT License. Copyright 2016 Joao Cardoso, Matias Korhonen, Rasmus Sten, and Stephen Sykes.
See the LICENSE file for more details.