The present disclosure relates to a method and system for configuring a computing system, such as a cloud computing system. A method includes selecting, based on a user selection received via a user interface, a workload for execution on a cluster of nodes of the computing system. The workload is selected from a plurality of available workloads including an actual workload and a synthetic test workload. The method further includes configuring the cluster of nodes of the computing system to execute the selected workload such that processing of the selected workload is distributed across the cluster of nodes. The synthetic test workload may be generated by a code synthesizer based on a set of user-defined workload parameters provided via a user interface that identify execution characteristics of the synthetic test workload.