Company: JustEatTakeaway.com (JET), SkipTheDishes (Skip)
Industry: Software & Technology (Energy & Utilties)
JustEatTakeaway.com (known as JET) is a leading global on-demand delivery company operating in 16 countries under brands including SkipTheDishes (known as Skip) in Canada. With 350,000+ restaurant partners, 60 million active customers, and more than half a billion orders delivered in 2024, the platform must handle continuous peak traffic across 10 time zones — every day.
After a Tier 3 service failure cascaded into one of the top 5 largest incidents in company history, JustEatTakeaway.com’s Platform Assurance team rebuilt their performance testing practice around Grafana Cloud K6 — running load tests across CI/CD pipelines, weekly stress tests at 17,500+ RPS, and order flow tests across all 16 countries, all in production.
Challenge
JustEatTakeaway.com’s load testing infrastructure had grown around an internally built tool called Rambo, originally developed in 2016. Over the years it expanded to support JMeter, Taurus, and Artillery — accumulating features and maintenance overhead with each addition. The platform worked, but it had become brittle and difficult to evolve.
The harder problem emerged from a Friday evening production incident. JustEatTakeaway.com’s analytic service — a Tier 3 component handling 750,000+ requests per minute at peak — migrated from EC2 to EKS without load testing in place. As the evening rush hit, Istio gateway pods scaled to capacity and then began failing under load. The critical detail: that gateway served Tier 1 traffic too — the features required for core business operations. Orders stopped coming in.
“To our business, this incident still remains in the top 5 largest incidents we have ever encountered.”
— Christopher Orchard, Senior SRE, JustEatTakeaway.com
At the time, Tier 3 services weren’t considered candidates for load testing. The incident proved the assumption wrong, and it became the defining catalyst behind how JustEatTakeaway.com approaches performance testing today.
Solution
JustEatTakeaway.com’s Platform Assurance team took a user-centric approach to replacing Rambo: structured user research with engineering teams, an internal proof of concept tested with real users, and open feedback collection — not just what worked, but what engineers disliked or outright rejected. The result was a decision made by engineers, not handed down to them. They chose Grafana Cloud K6.
K6 was integrated across three testing patterns. Pipeline testing runs automatically as applications move through QA, staging, and production — blocking deployments if thresholds are breached. A weekly scheduled stress test hits the analytic service at over 17,500 requests per second, created directly in response to the Friday night incident to ensure those conditions can never recur undetected. Order flow tests validate Tier 1 customer journeys across all 16 countries, covering more than 1,100 platform changes every week.
All tests run in production. Threshold-based auto-termination means tests stop automatically if response times spike or error rates climb, no engineer needs to be watching to protect real users.
Impact
JustEatTakeaway.com and Skip shifted from assumption-based assurances to evidence earned in production — with engineers who chose the platform driving adoption across the organization.
- Weekly 17,500+ RPS stress test validates the top-5 incident conditions cannot recur
- 1,100+ platform changes validated weekly through order flow tests across 16 countries
- High engineer adoption — teams requested early adopter access before rollout was complete
- Automated threshold-based test termination protects real users in production without manual intervention
- 21 geographically distributed load zones match test origin to real user locations
- Out-of-the-box dashboards and GitHub Actions integration — new pipeline workflows ready in minutes
“K6 was not a tool picked for our engineers. This was a tool picked by them, a tool they wanted to be using. In fact, we even had teams coming to us asking, ‘Can we be an early adopter of K6 while we were still setting it up?’ In platform engineering, you don’t often see that.”
— Christopher Orchard, Senior SRE, JustEatTakeaway.com
Looking ahead
JustEatTakeaway.com and Skip continues expanding their Grafana Cloud K6 usage across the organization, encouraging every engineering team to embed load testing into their software development lifecycle, shifting left with pipeline tests, and running continuously in production.
The goal is a culture where confidence isn’t assumed before a deployment, it’s proven.
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