Testing the Cloud
Writing by admin on Friday, 30 of July, 2010 at 7:26 am
In order to cope-up with the business needs, small and medium-sized companies needed a fast, secure, and scalable IT infrastructure. But these companies lack the ability to have this setup in-premise, due to huge capital investment that goes into the growing needs of the IT infrastructure, staff, and the expertise to administer, preventing them from focusing on their core businesses. Hence, emerged the need to migrate to cloud computing, a solution that helps organizations to focus on their core businesses rather than worrying about the investment and maintenance of their business IT infrastructure.
Typically, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are considered as types of cloud computing. In SaaS, software is held centrally and not by local machines, which is presented to the user on an on-demand basis usually by means of virtualization. Central control of the application is retained allowing for reduction in licensing, implementation, and ongoing maintenance costs. The delivery route in this instance is the ‘Cloud’, this being the general term for the Internet. Whereas, PaaS can be considered as the next step in the SaaS model, where on-demand delivery is not simply the specific item of software required but the users’ platform, allowing centralized control of the usage of each machine on the PaaS network.
Cloud computing solutions offer more scalability, location independent access, reduced cost of ownership, and improved server efficiency. They also help businesses to reduce the environmental impact of their IT infrastructure due to reduced requirement for hardware, implementations, and location dependence.
But, along with these potential benefits, cloud computing presents a new set of concerns such as security, privacy, availability, data integrity, lack of control, and integrity, which must be mitigated effectively if it is to be considered as a viable option for business. Third-party independent testing service providers with niche capabilities in the areas of performance testing, security testing, reliability testing, and experience in virtualization technologies are better suitable to do this work.
Migrating to a cloud environment requires an understanding of the new business needs and the inherited challenges associated with it. Hence, the scope of the software testing also needs to be widened to fully cover those business requirements and the inherited risks associated with cloud computing. In order to meet these testing requirements, organizations need to be equipped with additional resources including additional infrastructure such as different testing skills required by test engineers to perform the job of testing in a cloud.
Organizations must document the test strategy before initiating testing in order to gain benefits from cloud computing. They need to identify various types of testing to be performed and should choose the right cloud test environment. Understanding business characteristics of cloud computing and applicable cloud models to be tested play a pivotal role in choosing various cloud testing types such as, System Integration Testing (SIT), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Interoperability Testing, Compatibility Testing, Performance Testing, Load Testing, Stress Testing, Recovery Testing, and Security Testing.
The two possible options for choosing the right test environment include, simulating in-house cloud test environment and choosing the right cloud service provider. In addition to identifying applicable testing types, testing teams should also focus on general considerations that are common to cloud testing.
Hence, testing teams should develop a good testing strategy that discusses the scope of software testing to meet the business requirements and characteristics of cloud computing, mitigating the risks and issues introduced by cloud computing.
Category: Cloud Computing, Software Testing
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