Cloud Load Testing is one of the best applications of cloud computing. Several cloud load testing solutions are available that will permit you to make use of the cloud in some way. However, only a handful enables you to take advantage of the opportunities that load testing with the cloud offers.
Benefits of Cloud Testing –
•Smooth recording of a virtual user profile.
•Pictorial representation via graphs for easy understanding
•Handling of session parameters, which is the most difficult and time consuming for load testing user profiles. This does it automatically for you.
•Easy results comparisons. Generating graphs and charts based on a lot of raw data can be unbearable – a tool that automates this ability is a must.
Key features
Load Test your application’s Cloud scalability
•How quick your application scale
•Performance per instance
Identify the Cloud configuration bottlenecks
•Scaling infrastructure
•Application and or Backend
Validate your Cloud redundancy and fail over
•Switch between datacenters
•Fail over triggers and delays
Stress Test your max performance in the Cloud
•Max number of users
•Max aggregated bandwidth
Monitor end-user response time to the Cloud
•Reuse script for production monitoring
Advantage of clubbing Lab Testing and Cloud Testing
It is certainly a huge advantage to use cloud in our load testing, however, it does not imply to leave alone testing within our firewall. Both the types of testing have to go along together. Including either of the two singly, we are liable to get into disadvantages hence creating a loss. When choosing a load testing solution, you should make sure that it supports lab testing so you can confirm the performance on your application(s) internally, before you introduce additional variables by testing over the internet.
Cloud load testing allows generating virtual user loads from different parts of the world. This allows more accurate simulation of the actual load. Latency for example, can increase page response times and this would only be evident in a load test where the virtual users accessing the application were geographically dispersed.
When testing cloud applications, validating and verifying cloud-specific functions such as redundancy and performance scalability is challenging. For many cloud providers, dynamic server instance-creation based on CPU load and failover to alternate availability zones comes standard. Automating and verifying fail-over procedures requires testing and monitoring from outside the cloud. Cloud load testing has transformed load testing and has removed many of its biggest bottlenecks and limitations. It provides the tools to utilize load testing to its fullest.
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