Performance Testing in the Cloud and From the Cloud

Writing by Ralph Decker on Tuesday, 1 of September, 2009 at 9:53 am

The resources for cloud computing are generally made available through applications with web interfaces that provide functionality to allocate, configure, and maintain the resources. Hence cloud computing adds some ambiguity to the systems hosting your applications causing some concerns around performance and security. And for this reason any cloud integration should have a comprehensive performance testing plan.

Firstly have an end to end understanding of the application performance; ranging from knowing the requirements to understanding the impact on the systems. And with cloud some additional unknowns that need to be considered and planned for are response times, impact on the systems and most importantly the shared resources.

Once deployed into the Cloud, the only practical testing model is the external testing model – that is driving load into the application from a secondary location over the internet. This can easily provide information about response time compared to traffic or load. There will be a few hurdles to work out with the impact on the systems, but you can get a pretty good indication if carefully planned and coordinated. To measure and understand the impact of traffic on computer systems you must understand the environment and the infrastructure, generate realistic traffic, analyze the capabilities and the limitation of the system under test, and find the remedy for performance related defects.

The cloud is a shared environment. This must be taken into consideration for performance aspects of your applications that you deploy into the cloud. Few considerations in this regard are, who you are sharing the resources with, how much of resource is being consumed, how it is impacting the performance of your application, and is usage and performance consistent.

Performance monitoring is going to be essential to assure that your application remains responsive. Constant and on-going monitoring is a good way to verify that the performance continues to remain stable. For this you need to monitor over time, watch for degradation, do changes in performance correspond to changes in your application. Unexplained changes in performance may be attributed to, shared resources and cloud provisioning tool

Several factors that can lead to inadequate performance testing are, lack of requirements, lack of understanding the fundamentals of performance testing, misinformation provided by tool and simulator vendors, limited budget or funding and enormity of the task.

The application system evolved as per the organizational and end user need. It eventually became an integral part of business, banking, trading, shopping, and even entertainment, demanding perfect performance. Testing in the cloud adds testing capabilities that were not available in the past like multiple geographic locations, lots of unique real IP addresses, to formulate traffic patterns. Most performance testing clouds are built out in controlled cloud environments. To perform a controlled cloud testing, access to the full systems, know where the load originates- IP Address, geographic locations, control the distribution of the load, use same test system/systems for retesting, perfect coordination of the user traffic, and correlate the load with end-user response times and the impact of the systems under test.

Category: Cloud Computing, Performance Testing, Software Testing

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