Cloud computing provides us ‘COMPUTING’ as a utility. It will transform the IT services and make it more attractive as a service (more popularly known as SAAS model). The hardware landscape will also change based on the requirement of cloud infrastructure. As a whole, the computing and usage of software and hardware is going to change in a big way in the world of cloud computing. It will give more agility in terms of software applications and hardware infrastructure.
Performance testing, load testing, tuning and monitoring in the cloud environment are the buzzwords nowadays. The performance in general refers to the application’s response time, throughput, resource utilization etc.
Cloud computing is maturing day by day and the cloud infrastructure is the single largest computing infrastructure exists today. Most of the web based applications and apps are being deployed in the cloud for various advantages. The single most important factor is the scalability of the application. Application deployed in the cloud environment can use the power of thousands of computers whenever needed. As a result, the performance of the application increases significantly and the customer loyalty kept intact.
So the performance and load testing is essential for all the applications hosted in the cloud environment.
For the web application and mobile apps, the main challenge is to test both the internal application (which is running internally) and the customer facing application (which is running in production). Cloud based performance and load testing tools plays an important role here. Using the cloud approach, both the internal and production applications can be tested easily.
Let us have a look at the characteristics of cloud based performance testing.
- In general, a small subset of production application and data set is tested in an internal testing environment. Cloud performance testing infrastructure supports the exact scaling, as it appears in real production environment. As a result, it gives the actual performance report (considering the real traffic) instead of a subset of users.
- Cloud based performance and load testing supports global scaling. So the testing is done considering the actual number of concurrent users from multiple geographies.
- Cloud based performance testing tools not only verifies testing/staging applications, but also the production applications. Because, only the production environment is having the exact number of servers, users, data sets etc. So, testing the performance in the production environment is the biggest advantage of cloud testing.
Now we know the cloud performance testing details and its characteristics. Different monitoring tools validate the performance of your web and mobile applications. It provides cloud performance testing environment, where the infrastructure elasticity is ensured with application scaling.
