Microsoft recently introduced Azure App Testing, where the company brings together two capabilities: Azure Load Testing and Microsoft Playwright Testing. Both are now accessible through a single hub in the Azure Portal, providing users with a consistent experience for resource provisioning, access control, and consolidated billing.
The company aims to provide an efficient way of performing testing, where managing time and effort in testing infrastructure is taken away from the users. Azure App Testing offers Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tooling for test acceleration and insights, with Azure handling the scaling and provisioning. Regarding the AI-powered tooling, the company earlier added a load testing extension to VS Code in preview. John Stallo from Microsoft wrote:
It seamlessly handles authentication, API request sequencing, response validation, and test data—helping you save time and ensure realistic performance testing.
In addition, Playwright has tooling such as a VS Code extension, Codegen, and Playwright MCP with AI-assisted support. Simon Martinelli, a Java Champion, tweeted:
The best MCP server when doing any kind of web development is the one from Playwright. It allows the agent to run the app in the browser, take screenshots to verify the design, and perform additional tasks.
Azure App Testing, according to the company, also offers better scaling. With scaling, users have a way to simulate real-world traffic from multiple regions with load tests and run highly parallel, cross-browser end-to-end web tests.
Within Azure App Testing, users can leverage Azure Load Testing, which allows for high-scale load generation and traffic simulation for applications across various hosting environments, supporting both Apache JMeter and Locust tests. It enables load generation from multiple regions and testing of private endpoints, providing metrics to identify performance bottlenecks. On the other hand, with Playwright Workspaces, users can run end-to-end tests in parallel across multiple browsers and devices, delivering insights and results to help optimize functionality and performance.
(Source: Microsoft Learn)
While Microsoft has now introduced a consolidated hub for testing with Azure App Testing, both Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud offer a suite of services and tools to achieve similar capabilities. AWS provides a managed solution called Distributed Load Testing on AWS, which automates large-scale performance tests that also support frameworks like Apache JMeter and Locust. Furthermore, developers can also use the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to create and manage test environments. Similarly, Google Cloud customers can configure their solutions by leveraging tools like Apache JMeter on scalable services such as Cloud Run for load testing, and utilizing Firebase Test Lab for mobile applications or frameworks like Terraform for end-to-end testing of infrastructure.
Lastly, the pricing details of Azure App Testing are available on the pricing page, and more information and guidance are available through the landing page.
