API gateways and load balancers distribute traffic and provide controls such as rate limits and caching, but under excessive traffic these layers can also become bottlenecks. In DDoS-like conditions, one weak configuration can cascade into service-wide impact.
Planned DDoS simulation helps you observe gateway, balancer, and backend behavior together. At which threshold does latency increase, where do errors concentrate, and are protection rules acting as expected? With Engarde DDoS you can test these layers with multiple traffic profiles and protocols.
Report-based analysis helps isolate the weak link and define capacity, rule, or architecture changes. LoadEng performance testing is a useful complement on the same architecture for non-attack capacity evaluation.
Compare key gateway and balancer settings before and after simulations (timeouts, connection limits, rate limits), and record threshold changes. This data is highly valuable for both operations runbooks and capacity planning documentation.
For detailed steps, see our documentation and training center pages. Documentation · Training. For product-level details, see Engarde DDoS and LoadEng.