Cloud Testing

We are moving into a cloud pervasive zone. Gone are the days, when organizations were considering whether to host their applications on the cloud or to continue to work in a “behind the firewall” scenario. The shift in mind-set to a services model, is becoming increasingly prevalent, that all organizations now have (or are planning to have) a SaaS offering of their applications. Microsoft is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year and Bill Gates, has sent word that the company’s new goal will be “Apps on all devices running on the Microsoft cloud”. How do all of these pan out for the tester? If one looks at this closely, there are a lot of positives in testing on cloud. Firstly, there is a lot of saving on the application and environment set up time. Earlier a tester used to spend several cycles and iterations making sure the test environment is fully configured and set up. With a cloud based offering of an application this is a huge win. Secondly, when local setups are maintained, reproducing defects, and later debugging them, was often a very inefficient process. Over the cloud, this becomes a very straight forward activity, where everyone on the product team gets the same view of the application and issues can be seen on the same light. The tester gets to test the application in an end user like environment from the very beginning making the test effort more relevant and practical. However, with all of these positives, the tester also has to be ready to use that one common build that is being used by the rest of the team on the hosted environment for testing. This could mean that the build is very dynamic and susceptible to changes, not offering a steady environment to test. Obviously there is also the other angle to this where the tester not just tests an application on the cloud, but also leverages the cloud to set up the test infrastructure be it test machines, test applications, any additional software he may need etc. Companies such as SkyTap, Device Anywhere are making it easier for testers to perform their quality activities by providing the required tools and applications on an on demand basis besides of course the major players offering test machine instances. Also, the cloud is no more restricted to just software, platform and infrastructure as a service – newer areas such as backend are all becoming a service. With the shift into the application world, we have probably just scratched the surface of what cloud could offer for us. As a tester, these are exciting times ahead and it would pay off to sharpen ones cloud testing skills.  

Cloud based testing is on boom but depending on technological advancement and resources plus other things there are also many challenges related to it. Talking about Cloud Testing, it one of the most advantageous way of testing in today's world, as with the help of cloud testing we can test all types of compatibility testing in a single machine instead of testing on different machines. But there are major challenges that we can face in cloud Testing which are as follows:   1. On-demand test environment construction: Although the current cloud technologies support automatic provision of required computing resources for each SaaS in a cloud, there are not much of supporting solutions to assist engineers to set up a required test environment in a cloud using a cost-effective way. Engineers can handle by solving it via an on-demand test environment where user's selection is viable option.   2. Scalability and performance testing: Performance testing address issues and solutions in conventional distributed software or web-based software systems. this subject, most existing papers focus on scalability evaluation metrics and frameworks for parallel and distributed systems. Performance testing are usually conducted in a static and pre-fixed system environment, so the existing solutions did not consider the special features in cloud testing, for example dynamic scalability and scalable testing environments.   3. Testing security and measurement in clouds: Since security becomes a major concern inside clouds and security services become a necessary part in modern SaaS and cloud technology, to deal with this engineers must deal the issues and challenges in security validation and quality assurance for SaaS and clouds.   4. There is a lack of well-defined validation methods and quality assurance standards to address the connection protocols, interfaces available for interaction, and service APIs provided by SaaS and clouds APIs.

  5. Cloud Service challenges: This says that whether the service will be available on demand or not, or there will be delays in it, as with less resources available we can suffer delay in it. So to improve this we should to go to providers which have enough resource and we do not have suffer any delays. 6. Security Challenges: This is one of the major factor for cloud testing, as we test on cloud there are several important and confidential data on cloud which might get leaked to other users. So to improve upon this factor we should have to secure protocol between the user and the client so that the data is not leaked. 7. To have a knowledgeable Resource: This states that the resource using the cloud testing should have proper knowledge of it otherwise there can loss of time and money. So to improve upon this factor we should use the knowledgeable Resource or properly guide them for the proper testing.

8. Limited Infrastructure: This says that some of the cloud providers only offers some limited configuration, servers, storage, networking and bandwidth which can affect the testing. So to improve this we should go to those providers which offer all types of configuration, it may cost us more but it will help delivering a Quality Product. So, Overall if cloud testing is used efficiently it can be really helpful for the QA team.  

Cloud safer than the traditional data center, cloud run on below mentioned three layers and all three layers allow users to run application and store data online. However, each offers a different level of user flexibility and control 1. SaaS (Software as a Service)-  allow users to run existing online applications. Where off-the-shef applications are accessed over the Internet. 2. Paas (Platform as a Service) - allow users to create their own cloud applications using supplier - specific tools and languages. Provides environment and tools foe creating new online applications. 3. Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service)  - allow users to run any application they please on cloud hardware of their own choice. Also, allow

Cloud data is more secure than traditional data centers as data stored in cloud have more protection due to multiple levels of security. There are layers of intrusion prevention and detection system, firewalls and other security layers but data centers are only protected by physical security.This security is not only limited to retina scanners, backup cooling systems and power generators and multiple network providers. In cloud, our data gets replicated and stored at various cloud centers and if any issue occurs at any center then our data remains intact and out of harm's way due to storage and backing up of data. With that, cloud computing seems to be the safest way to store, back up and protect your data.

“Testing in Cloud” is a term that can be inferred in various ways. At QA InfoTech, we leverage the cloud to augment our test services empowering us to improve our testing efficiencies – be it test bed setup time, tester’s productivity, access to high end infrastructure, software.

We extensively work with several cloud offerings including some of the leading ones such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure. We have leveraged the cloud for several of our client assignments for areas such as functional, performance, compatibility, globalization testing.  At QA InfoTech, cloud testing is an important area of interest for ongoing Research and Development (R&D) and we continue to share our knowledge with the community through our blogs, white papers, key note sessions in conferences etc. besides sharing the benefits with our clients through our test solutions. For additional details on cloud testing services, please visit our Knowledge Center or write to us [email protected]