What are the options for testing in the Cloud?

I’m in the final stages of preparing my presentation and workshop session for the UK Test Management Summit next week in London and its making me think more about cloud computing in general as well as performance testing. Either testing in cloud environments or using the cloud to deliver more scalable performance tests.

Intechnica’s research paper last year, entitled “How Fast Is The Cloud?” investigated the relative performance of a simple eCommerce application on various different cloud platforms including IaaS and PaaS options. We demonstrated that a well implemented cloud solution could out-perform traditional hardware but that poor implementations would confirm cloud-sceptics suspicions about poor performance in the cloud.

At Intechnica, as well as using cloud environments to functionally and performance test code that we’re developing for clients, we use cloud based performance test tools to test our customer’s own test environments. By using cloud based load generators (injectors) and the Intechnica TrafficSpike product, we can quickly provision tens of load generators, use them for a few hours and then decommission the servers. This allows for highly scalable, comparatively low cost performance testing particularly when compared to trraditional models where multiple servers sit idle waiting for the one day per week or month where they’re used to their full potential.

The trend in performance testing seems to be a move away from traditional performance test tools and towards cloud-based load generation. This is demonstrated by the growth in companies such as SOASTA, LoadStorm, blitz.io and BlazeMeter. Our workshop at TMF will give test managers the opportunity to discuss these different test technologies and obtain a better understanding of cloud performance and the implications for their business. As well as this we’ll be giving attendees the opportunity to use Intechnica’s Cloudflex product to see how easy it can be to provision multiple, identical test environments for themselves.

I’m looking forward to meeting attendees next week to discuss the implications of cloud computing for those of us in the testing industry.