#cloud load testing

Cloud has provided an easy to go and scalable platform for all IT related needs of an organization. Its pay-per-use model makes it a very cost effective solution in order to align the business operations in a more profitable manner.

Various types of services which cloud offers facilitates users to perform their tasks related to personal as well as professional requirements. Users can store their document on the cloud or make use of an enterprise application to work upon the corporate data for official purpose.

Web applications testing is also highly influenced with the advantages of cloud services with its features like flexibility, scalability etc. Cloud has revolutionized the Load Testing practices of testing a web application, allowing a tester to analyze the efficiency of each and every component of the application. Using cloud in load testing enables it to conduct more realistic and efficient large-scale testing for a web app and provide significant cost effective testing.

Scope of load testing can be enhanced using cloud as:

Web applications experience a sudden increase in traffic sometimes and can even reach to the break-point of the application. This increases the load to an extent that a web app is unable to serve the request properly and ultimately haults the app or crashes it. In order to take appropriate measures or to define an appropriate error handling condition in the code of the application, it is desired to understand and know about the load handling capability of the app. Cloud services helps in producing the virtual load that an application will actually encounter when it will be hosted on a live server. Moreover, the load can be generated on-demand which further assists in setup of virtual machines in a very small amount of time. On the contrary, conventional load generating method would require the actual setup of load generating terminals and further configuration.

While testing a web app inside the boundaries of the organization would only generate a limited set of test scenarios, testing using cloud drastically increases the scope of load testing. Since the terminals in real-time are located outside the firewall of the server, deploying a cloud based testing strategy produces the same environment. This helps a tester to validate all the parameters required to test an app including the ISP, network equipment, DNS etc. This gives a more realistic approach in testing an app for all set of combinations in order to validate it for actual hosting on the production server.

Cloud services provide the ease of replicating the image of virtual machine of desired configuration. This facilitates in the setup of large number of machines in a very small time and furthermore, this service can be withdrawn at any point of time. It benefits an organization in testing an app whenever and wherever necessary without bearing the burden of extra cost and time.

A cloud testing strategy usually evolves the load testing methology for effective and efficient testing of an app if all the primary considerations for the same are matched properly. A prior analysis of the degree of integration of cloud with the load testing tools is required and recommended for this purpose.

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been writing articles for various outsourced software development companies like Q3 technologies. Moreover, she has been providing useful content writing material related to windows mobile application.