Cloud Applications Require Cloud-Based Performance Testing

Cloud computing provides “computing” as a utility, transforming IT services. Both the software and hardware landscape have changed in a big way — and will continue to change — based on the requirements of Cloud infrastructure and its increasing popularity. Cloud computing can offer more agility for both software applications and hardware infrastructure.

Performance testing, load testing, tuning, and monitoring in the Cloud are all popular buzzwords. “Performance,” when it comes to the Cloud, refers in general to an 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 that exists today. For many web-based and mobile applications, deploying in the Cloud offers some serious benefits worth taking advantage of now.

The single most important benefit is the scalability of the application: applications deployed in a Cloud environment can harness the power of thousands of computers whenever needed — and, as a result, the performance of the application can increase significantly. This means more customer loyalty and better revenue.

It would follow, then, that performance testing and load testing are essential for all applications hosted in a Cloud environment. For web applications and mobile apps, the main challenge is to test both the internal application (which is, of course, running internally) and the customer-facing application (which is running in production).

Cloud-based performance and load testing tools play an important role here. Using a Cloud-specific approach, both the internal and production applications can be tested easily and in an environment which has been designed to mimic realistic deployment conditions.

Some Basic Characteristics and Important Benefits of Cloud-Based Performance Testing:

In general, a small subset of production applications and data sets is tested in an internal testing environment. Cloud performance testing infrastructure supports the exact scaling, as it appears in a real production environment. As a result, testing generates the actual performance report (considering real traffic) instead of a subset of users.

Cloud-based performance and load testing support global scaling — so testing is done taking into account the actual number of concurrent users from multiple geographical regions.

Cloud-based performance testing tools not only verify the testing/staging applications, but also the production applications, because only the production environment has the exact number of servers, users, data sets, and so on. Testing for performance in the production environment, then, is the biggest advantage of Cloud testing.

Now that you know the basic details, characteristics and most of all, the importance — of Cloud performance testing, you can get to work. Apica can help you to test failover procedure and Cloud latency, and to plan proactive Cloud scaling for your web and mobile applications. Test the limits of the Cloud here.