Cloud Load Testing has recently emerged as one of the best applications of cloud computing. Cloud computing generates economies of scale and provides unprecedented access to inexpensive computing resources. While the utility of load testing is universally acknowledged, conventional load testing using in-house resources has many limitations and bottlenecks.
One of the biggest issues with load testing is that a large load test typically requires utilization of lots of hardware and this takes time to setup. Let’s consider a load test with 10,000 virtual users. If each load agent machine can handle 1,000 virtual users without performance degradation, this would mean that about 10 load agent machines are needed to run the load test. This is often very time consuming to setup. In some of the larger organizations this can take weeks. Even in smaller companies this can take a few days. Cloud load testing makes these resources available instantly. A cloud load testing tool would allow users to select the desired number of load agents and have them available within minutes.
Hardware utilization increases costs. In a typical organization the load testing may last only a few days. However, many of the load agent machines may have to be either purchased just for this reason or taken away from some other project. Purchase would clearly be expensive. Even if these machines were temporarily ‘borrowed’ from other projects, setting them up and then finally moving them back would take time. This would result in delayed projects and lower output. In cloud load testing, no such provisioning is needed. The computing resources are completely elastic and can be created and terminated on demand. If you perform cloud load testing for a few days, you only pay for those resources for that period of time.
Many websites have a wide audience that is spread geographically. In some cases this audience is global. Cloud load testing allows you to generate virtual user loads from different parts of the world. This allows more accurate simulation of the actual load. Latency for example, can increase page response times and this would only be evident in a load test where the virtual users accessing the application were geographically dispersed. If you web application is going to be accessed by users all over the world, it would be a good idea to run a load test where the virtual users are accessing the web application from all over the world. Cloud load testing tools will allow you to select users from all over the world as part of your virtual user profile.
Cloud load testing has transformed load testing and has removed many of its biggest bottlenecks and limitations. Cloud load testing provides the tools to utilize load testing to its fullest.
