Taurus is a tool for performance testing that relies on JMeter and Gatling as underlying testing frameworks. It provides simplified scripting, reporting and scaling capabilities, and can integrate with Jenkins and BlazeMeter. Performance testing with Taurus is important to identify bottlenecks, discover maximum concurrent users, find bad influences on performance, and know hardware limits. The presentation demonstrates using Taurus with Gatling scripts and its integration with Jenkins and BlazeMeter.