Published: 23 Jan 2017
Need for a Perfect Performance Testing Strategy in the Cloud
Last Updated: 10 Jan 2024
Offering virtual pool of resources for storage and computing, cloud services have taken the industrial era to the era of information access. Cloud computing has completely changed the way applications are being developed, deployed, and used by the end users.
Contents
1. What is cloud Based Environment?
2. What is Cloud Performance Testing?
3. Types of Performance Tests on the Cloud
4. Conclusion
What is cloud Based Environment?
Applications become highly scalable with the availability of an infinite pool of resources, and the cloud-based environment has apparently made our lives very easy. Given below are some simple yet necessary changes observed with the cloud-based environment.
• Access to emails outside of office premises
• Updating mobile applications without any particular requirement
• Updating social statuses while traveling
• Accessing bank accounts while commuting
What is Cloud Performance Testing?
As cloud computing is on the rise, enterprise IT organizations have been adopting the cloud with a clear focus on infrastructure-as-a-service. The rise of mobile and website applications necessitate adoption of cloud. To make these applications effective and feasible, it is important to ensure their performance in all conditions of use. Performance being the utmost factor in testing a web application, it directly impacts end-user experience. Although performance testing in the cloud is quite different from the traditional approach, proper strategy and planning are involved while testing on the cloud.
The main aim of performance testing is to measure certain parameters such as latency, throughput with the variation in the number of parallel users accessing the application. With virtualization picking up, processes have to be made far more robust for cloud infrastructure. The real challenge comes when determining what should be moved to the cloud, and if so, whether public or private or would a hybrid be the correct choice. Would it provide value to the business? These questions make the transition to cloud all the more challenging.
Let’s understand what cloud is?
Cloud is a scalable pay-per-use model, where you can request for additional resources for a defined period. There is a high degree of location independence, for which virtual resources are assigned and reassigned dynamically according to the customer’s need. Storage, bandwidth, processing and a number of users accessing it at any point are some of the cloud metrics that are imperative for a successful cloud implementation. Elasticity being the major factor for cloud infra defines the ability of the cloud to deal with fluctuating load variations by adding resources and decreasing when required. Other factors that define a good cloud infrastructure are availability, scalability, and fault tolerance.
By moving load and performance application testing to the cloud, benefits such as lowering operational and capital costs can be realized. Testing in the cloud also lets you maximize your returns by utilizing cost-effective means of scalable testing applications. It helps in stimulating load tests that constitutes millions of concurrent users from various geographies.
Types of Performance Tests on the Cloud
The types of performance tests that can be performed on the cloud are:
• Load and performance tests
• Latency testing
• Capacity test
• Soak tests
• Failover tests
• Stress tests
• Browser performance testing
The major factor pushing cloud computing is cost-effectiveness. Cloud helps in creating separate test regions for system testing with utmost ease. The test strategy should align completely with the idea of moving to the cloud, including ease of infrastructure access, costs savings, a decrease in cycle times, and choosing the types of cloud such as public, private or hybrid. The strategy should also clearly mention types of other tests to be performed in the cloud such as soak tests, capacity tests, etc. Infrastructure requirements, building a test environment, required testing tools, software, hardware, and bandwidth be the other factors that should be an important part of your test strategy.
Execution of tests is the final step that needs to be done after the entire set-up is complete. For performance tests, it is necessary to vary the load with changing user’s demands and other factors so it can be tested according to a defined test strategy. It is important to make sure that all policies are clear with the Cloud services provider as usage is linked with the payment closely. Organizations are required to pay as they scale and as per the usage.
Conclusion
TestingXperts’ performance testing teams have successfully conducted performance testing on the cloud for various clients. Our performance testing resource pool has expertise in open source (such as JMeter), proprietary, and commercial tools such as Load Runner, VSTS, etc. that helps us in offering you a tool agnostic methodology for performance testing. Get in touch with our advisors for all your performance testing queries at [email protected]