Performance smoke tests that respect staging neighbours

Staging is shared real estate. Before you spin k6, post duration, peak VUs, and endpoints touched in the platform channel. Include a kill switch contact—even if it is you sleeping with phone on silent.

Script for staircase ramps, not cliffs. The shape should make graphs readable for SREs who glance between meetings. If you need spikes, isolate them to a dedicated tenant or local docker compose.

Document what you will ignore: caching layers that behave differently, third-party rate limits, synthetic data volume. Honest caveats keep performance tests trustworthy when numbers wobble.