Performance Testing in Cloud Environment

Performance testing is conducted to find out the application under test (AUT) performance bottlenecks and their root causes under different load conditions. This activity always requires large infrastructure, controlled environment and team effort which ultimately increases the performance testing budget. Moreover, setting up a controlled test environment where you can have complete control and access over the AUT and you can generate the desired load, is also a challenging task and not always possible through traditional performance testing approach. Cloud performance testing helps the testing teams to not only deploy the application over the cloud but also to generate load from different geographical locations without setting up any additional components.

Challenges and Limitations of On-Premise Performance Testing

Creating an exact replica of the production system is the basic point of performance testing. Installing the performance testing tools along with various profilers and monitoring of the tools is also required when you are preparing a performance test environment. Sometimes it’s required to test the application for thousands or even millions of users accessing the application from different geographical locations and in such scenarios you need hundreds of load generators. Preparing a lab environment with all of the above requirements is extremely challenging and needs lots of efforts and cost.

Advantages of Cloud Performance Testing

Although AUT complete testing (Functional, Regression, and Security etc.) can be performed in a cloud environment but performance testing is most benefited in this model. Following are some of the benefits which the performance testing teams can avail by conducting performance testing over the cloud.

Flexibility:

Different levels of tests can be performed concurrently on discrete environment and there is no need to wait for others to complete the testing and provide you the test environment access.

Simplicity:

It’s extremely simple to perform the regression testing over the cloud as you just need to modify few configurations to launch a new build.

Comprehensive Testing:

Cloud environment makes it easy to perform end-to-end testing by publishing the required components over the could to setup the application complete chain.

Cost Reduction:

One of the biggest advantages of cloud environment is that you only have to pay for the resources which you use. This model reduces the test cost to considerable limits and reports suggest that cloud environment reduces the test cost up to 70%. It’s always difficult for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to setup the performance test environment and cloud environment is the best option for them.

One of the biggest advantages of cloud environment is that you only have to pay for the resources which you use. This model reduces the test cost to considerable limits and reports suggest that cloud environment reduces the test cost up to 70%. It’s always difficult for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to setup the performance test environment and cloud environment is the best option for them.

Performance Test Environment Setup Options

In performance test environment, you mainly deploy AUT and load generators. Following are some of the cloud performance testing options which you can select on the basis of your requirements:

• Deploy application in local lab and load generators in cloud

• Deploy application in cloud and load generators in local lab

• Deploy both application and load generators in cloud

In light of the above discussion, it can be concluded that, keeping in view the advantages of the cloud model, testing teams should use the cloud services in order to effectively test the application with less effort and cost.