Testing an app for its usability, scalability and resource usage is performance testing. It helps the teams get an idea on the user experience during the high load period. Setting up the performance test environment is a key activity in the performance testing process and consumes sufficient amount of time of performance testing resources. The time consumed is because of a lot of challenges faced during the environment setup task. Those challenges can be summarized as –

Challenges faced while setting up infrastructure:

• The hardware and the software are usually purchased from external vendors and purchasing process is very time consuming and expensive
• It takes time for the availability and setup of infrastructure, tools and softwares
• If environment usage is not planned well, most of the time it remains un-utilized
• Environment is created by one team, managed by other and used by the third. This increases a lot of dependencies

Cloud:

Cloud computing is a framework of multiple servers located in different locations. It can meet the requirements of multiple projects and teams in shared manner thus utilizing the resources in the most optimal manner while meeting every team’s requirements.

Advantages of the cloud:

• Infrastructure managed by a third party, thus focus can be increased on core tasks
• Machine can be switched off and on based on when you want to use it and you pay only for the time you use the machine
• One can create a replica of machine as a template and whenever he wants to use similar machine, he can create an instance from that template and use that instance as his machine
• Allocating and un-allocating resources to your infrastructure doesn’t consume significant amount of time / money

However while taking the decision of moving your infrastructure to the cloud, it is essential that you look at the risks too –

• Possibility of service outage from the service provider. It may impact you to meet your business goals and thus loose business
• Migration of your infrastructure from one cloud service provider to another is time consuming and complicated
• In case of cloud there is a threat to data and security and the risks are shared by the service provider and the client
• Cloud is like a shared service and an increase in load from one component may impact the other component present on the cloud. Performance can be an issue on cloud

How to test using AgileLoad on cloud?

• Go to Amazon cloud and create an EC2 machine
• Search for AgileLoad template and create a machine using the template
• Buy a license (for number of users you need) and use the key in the widget once the machine is created
• Create your scripts and run your tests J

Have a look to our tutorial Cloud testing with AgileLoad

Our whitepaper about Cloud performance testing

This post is also available in: Anglais