Performance Testing Strategy in Cloud

“Cloud” simply refers to “something” placed “somewhere” on the Internet.

Story of Cloud Computing started 10 years ago, when the computational requirement to run a software required a set of process and a considerable span of time (in weeks). This complete process involved manual execution.

However in today’s era of visualization and Cloud computing, the deployment, monitoring and infrastructure management of an application is deployed on a virtual pool of infinite resources comprising computing, storage and networking resources. Auto-scaling, Auto-deployment are the run time requirements to handle an application load. Here pay-per-use model is used where additional resources are allocated as per requirement.

Question arises, how the performance of these applications can be measured over the cloud.

Performance is the prime requirement in testing a web application as it directly impacts the end user experience. Performance testing in cloud must be capable to measures the parameters including system throughput, latency with changing number of parallel users accessing your application, with different load profiles and various other performance metrics

Cloud metrics which contributes in successful Cloud implementation includes

• Bandwidth, storage, processing and number of concurrent users handling at any given point.
• Elasticity, one of the major factors for cloud infrastructure which defines the cloud ability to deal with varying load requirements by increasing/decreasing the available resources.
• Scalability, Availability, Fault tolerance and Reliability are the other factors which defines a good cloud infrastructure.

Including performance and load testing via cloud brings the benefit of lowering capital and operational costs and also provides distributed software development and testing environment.

Cloud-based testing lets you get the maximum by utilizing a cost-effective means of testing applications at scale. It also allows you to simulate load tests constituting millions of concurrent users coming from multiple geographical locations.

Various types of performance tests which can be performed on cloud are:

• Stress testing 
• Load & performance testing 
• UI Performance testing 
• Latency testing
• Infrastructure testing 
• System Fail over Testing 
• Capacity testing 
• Soak testing (testing a system with a typical production load, over a continuous availability period)

Cost savings, infrastructure access ease, reduction in cycle times, choice of public, private or hybrid cloud etc. must be considered while defining the test strategy for cloud testing. It should also cover the specific type of testing needs to be performed among the ones mentioned above. Security risks associated with the Cloud should always be kept in mind before taking the final decision. Test environment buildup with required testing tools, bandwidth, hardware and software are other parameters which needs to be covered within the Test Strategy.

Security, quality, reliability, latency, bandwidth etc. should be carefully looked upon while going with any external cloud service provider.