Audience¶
PerfShop targets several audiences with complementary needs. This page describes each user profile and explains what the platform brings them concretely.
Software testing instructors¶
Profile: professors, training consultants, QA leads who run training sessions on software testing, performance or chaos engineering.
What PerfShop brings¶
- Ready-to-use environment — a single
docker compose upis enough to start everything for a group of students - Centralized control — single
chaos-adminpanel to activate or deactivate every chaos family in one click - Graded progression — five levels per family (0 = disabled, 1 = Junior, ... 4 = Master) to adapt difficulty to the group
- Complete observability — provisioned Grafana dashboards, Loki logs, Tempo traces, Pyroscope profiles already configured
- Lockable student mode — allows starting / stopping a lab in a single click, blocking or unblocking student interfaces
- Optional lab library — included with the commercial license, covering all chaos families and levels
Typical use cases¶
- In-house corporate training over a day or a week
- University courses in QA, testing, performance, security (bachelor's / master's)
- Internal "bug-hunt" hackathons
- ISTQB / TMAP certification training on business chaos
QA, testing, performance, security students¶
Profile: bachelor's or master's IT students, bootcamp attendees, or career changers discovering the role of test engineer, performance engineer, security engineer or DevOps.
What PerfShop brings¶
- Safe training ground — break, fix, observe, restart with no consequences
- Autonomous progression — the BAC1-BAC5 escape-room journey can be completed alone or in pairs
- Concrete vocabulary — students manipulate in real life the concepts they study in class (heap, GC, thread pool, race condition, SQLi, IDOR)
- Exposure to modern tools — Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, Selenium, Squash TM, Forgejo — all present in the same stack
Required level¶
No specific prerequisite — BAC1 level is accessible to a student who has never touched observability. Levels 3 and 4 however require solid foundations in HTTP, cryptography and reverse engineering.
Curious developers¶
Profile: backend or frontend developers who want to understand how a realistic application is built and instrumented, or who want to get familiar with the observability ecosystem.
What PerfShop brings¶
- Fully open source code (AGPL-3.0-or-later) — nothing is hidden, everything can be read, forked, modified
- Concrete instrumentation examples — Micrometer, Spring Boot Actuator, OpenTelemetry, Pyroscope integration
- Clean and commented architecture — each Java service and React component has its Javadoc or explanatory comment
- Complete showcase — Spring Boot 3.2, React 18, Vite 5, Docker Compose, Nginx, in-house i18n, RSA-PSS license system
A developer who wants to see "how it's done in real life" can pick from PerfShop directly reusable patterns: minimalist React i18n wrapper, Spring license interceptor, vanilla i18n loader for static HTML, Docker socket integration for monitoring, etc.
Enterprise QA teams¶
Profile: testing teams (functional, performance, security, automation) looking for a common environment to upskill, train on new tools or evaluate candidates during interviews.
What PerfShop brings¶
- Common reference — the whole team speaks the same language by manipulating the same chaos types
- Onboarding medium — a newcomer can run through BAC1-BAC5 to get familiar with Grafana, Loki, Tempo and the perf/security concepts
- Evaluation medium — a QA or perf candidate can be faced with an active chaos and rated on their ability to identify, reproduce and document it
- Demo showcase — pre-sales teams can concretely demonstrate what they know how to diagnose
The Enterprise commercial license provides terms tailored to multi-team deployments.
Performance engineers and SREs¶
Profile: performance specialists, Site Reliability Engineers, LoadRunner / JMeter / k6 / Gatling consultants.
What PerfShop brings¶
- Realistic test target — a Java backend + MySQL database + React front, with the full checkout funnel, cart, profile, orders
- Pre-wired scenarios — 20 weather scenarios N1-01 to N4-05 combining several simultaneous chaos types
- Ready-to-use metrics — Micrometer exposes
/actuator/prometheuswith all JVM, HTTP, Tomcat, HikariCP metrics - Instant heap dump — dedicated widget in the monitoring dashboard to generate and download a
.hproffile - Complete observability stack — Tempo for OTLP traces, Pyroscope for continuous profiling, Loki for logs
A perf engineer can use PerfShop as a test bench to:
- Validate a new JMeter or k6 attack pattern
- Test how their tooling reacts to different degradation profiles
- Learn how to read a heap dump with Eclipse MAT
- Correlate a Tempo trace with a Pyroscope profile and a Loki log
Application security engineers¶
Profile: pentesters, Application Security Engineers, developers who want to be exposed to OWASP flaws.
What PerfShop brings¶
- 12 OWASP flaws activatable on demand (S1-S12) covering A01, A02, A03, A04, A07, A08, A09
- Chained S10-S11-S12 scenario — chains information disclosure → SQLi → privilege escalation on a vulnerable admin portal (see Admin portal)
- Pedagogical context — each flaw is documented (OWASP, CVSS, theoretical remediation)
- Isolated environment — no risk of overflowing onto an external system
The security usage can be combined with Scripting Chaos to train automation teams on handling complex authentications.
Tech leads / architects¶
Profile: tech leads, lead architects, CTOs who want to evaluate a candidate, dissect a real architecture or build an in-house training program.
What PerfShop brings¶
- Documented architecture — system diagrams, deployment topology, data schema, authentication flow (see Architecture section)
- Explicit trade-offs — every technical choice is justified in the documentation (consolidated vs incremental Flyway, in-house i18n vs react-intl, etc.)
- Reusable patterns — instrumentation, interceptors, pedagogical multi-session management, RSA-PSS license system
Hackathon students¶
Profile: participants in a hackathon or in a security / performance challenge.
What PerfShop brings¶
- Structured journey — BAC1-BAC5 offers 100 enigmas calibrated to fill a full day of hackathon
- Gradual challenge — starts with catalog reading and ends with HMAC reversing / cryptography
- Automatic validation — no human referee needed to verify answers
See Hackathon scenario for an example walkthrough.
What PerfShop does not target¶
- General-purpose end users — PerfShop is not a real e-commerce site, no one is supposed to place orders on it
- Teams looking for a substitute for production monitoring — PerfShop ships with Grafana/Prometheus/Loki/Tempo, but for pedagogical needs, not for monitoring real production systems
- Complete IT novices — some familiarity with HTTP, databases and the terminal is expected