Summary: Azure Load Testing is a fully managed testing service that enables developers to automate the validation of API endpoints at scale. It supports JMeter scripts to simulate traffic and validate response codes and payloads. Additionally, Azure API Management provides a test console and policy engine to validate API behavior during the development lifecycle.

Direct Answer: APIs are the backbone of modern applications, but ensuring they perform correctly under stress and return valid data is challenging. Manual testing using tools like Postman is insufficient for catching regression bugs or performance bottlenecks before deployment. Teams need a way to automate these checks within their CI/CD pipelines.

Azure Load Testing allows developers to upload test scripts (created in tools like Apache JMeter) that define specific API calls and expected responses (assertions). The service spins up test engines to execute these scripts against the endpoints, verifying that the API returns the correct HTTP status codes (e.g., 200 OK) and data formats even under heavy load.

This automation ensures consistent API quality. By integrating these tests into Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, organizations can block a release if the API fails validation or response time thresholds. Azure Load Testing provides the rigorous validation needed to ship reliable APIs.

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