As the application performance is the main source to drive the business growth, testing the conventional software applications serves a critical role in the growth of any enterprise or organization. In conventional on premises testing scenarios, setting up an infrastructure for testing was the prime area of focus for the enterprises. However, with the growing dominance of cloud computing, testing applications in cloud environment has become a need of the businesses today.
Cloud testing enables businesses set up and maintain the testing environment in the cloud, eliminating the cost and overhead of capital expenditure, resource pooling and reducing the time for business offerings. Not only that, it brings end-to-end solution that transforms the way testing is carried out and help enterprises get a competitive edge while reducing the cost of testing mission critical applications. Let’s take a deeper look at what cloud testing is all about and what are the benefits it brings to the business. Also, we’ll cover some best practices to perform testing in the cloud environment.
As the name suggests, cloud testing is nothing but a way of testing applications utilizing different resources over the cloud environment. It is important to note that the resources will be nothing but the hardware, software, infrastructure and other elements needed to perform testing. Cloud testing brings an end-to-end solution, which revolutionize the way testing is performed. It also helps businesses or enterprises to gear up the competitiveness while getting down the overall cost of testing.
With the help of cloud testing, organizations can easily cut-off provisioning time as cloud can test the servers on demand. This at the end ensures zero idle time of the unused servers over the cloud. Apart from all these, cloud testing brings tons of other benefits for the businesses. Let’s take a look at a few of the noticeable benefits of cloud testing:
Test environments are provisioned quickly: In a conventional testing, organizations have to spend a lot of time and money to set up and run testing environment. However, with the cloud testing, setting up and running the testing environment becomes easy and faster. The organizations won’t have to spend hours ‘n’ hours and they can fulfill the project timelines easily.
Also, it becomes easy for the enterprises or individuals to simulate the test replica of the project environment. This empowers testing teams to test for different business cases and identify bugs on the go.
Lower the cost of setting up test environment/infrastructure: If you’ve ever noticed, you will find that at least 30-50% of the servers are dedicated only for testing. However, not all of them are actually utilized because testing is performed at particular interval of time. So, most of the servers remain idle for the rest of the time.
On the other hand, in cloud testing, the businesses can easily set up testing environment when they require and free-up all the servers after testing is completed. This will at the end help enterprises or organizations to reduce overall cost.
Ease of customizing hardware resources: Cloud testing enables businesses to simulate the production scenarios in different ways through testing. It helps businesses to verify the load with the help of the performance testing. Also, it enables testing scenarios in different environments with multiple browsers and operating systems.
Support the concept of green computing: Green computing is nothing but a way of utilizing computing resources effectively and efficiently. Today, organizations extensively use servers and computers to perform various business activities. In such a scenario, opting for cloud testing will help organizations to reduce carbon foot print and becomes more environment-friendly.
More effective usage of the resources: Cloud servers could easily help businesses to improve the efficiency and utilization through an effective distribution of workload. It will empower organizations to leverage from the existing computing infrastructure from the vendor, which at the end reduce the overall cost of computing.
Okay, but how to get maximum benefit from cloud testing? Here’s the list of the best practices for testing cloud-based applications.
Get through the concepts of cloud computing. Well, this is the first and basic thing that every organization or individual should develop. One should understand the concepts of cloud computing and identify business risks to eliminate them.
Don’t forget to conduct pilot projects; it will help you identify the power of cloud-based testing for your business. Usually, pilot projects are less risky when it comes to evaluation of the feasibility of testing in the cloud. It becomes easy for the businesses to either test the cloud itself or host testing infrastructure in the cloud.
Intricate strategies are another great way to get more details on cloud testing. Elaborating strategies can include setting up criteria for testing applications, cloud vendors and levels of testing. You can easily get help from the cloud testing vendors and QA consulting firms for this.
Gear up interaction between the testing teams and be prepared for the complexities. There is no denying that testing cloud-based applications will increase time-by-time. Therefore, it is important to establish interaction between the testing and development teams. Also, enterprises will have to be prepared to test the additional complexities associated with the cloud-based applications.
Improve research. Of course, there are a lot of open issues and challenges exist when it comes to cloud testing. Therefore, rather than addressing such issues or challenges in separation, it is more advisable to conduct a detailed research on it with the help of researchers and practitioners.
Also, you can utilize various tools available in the market to perform cloud testing. You can use Monitis, Cloudsleuth, GFI, LoadStorm, CloudHarmony, BlazeMeter and so on are a few of the popular tools you can leverage from to perform cloud testing.
According to the recent reports from Gartner, most of the organizations will go for cloud solutions in the coming five years. Therefore, cloud testing will help enterprises leverage from better security and powerful tools. What’s your stand on this? Share your experiences or views in the comments…!
By Prashant Chambakara,
Prashant is a Test Consultant at TestingWhiz, is passionate about software testing and test automation. He loves to discuss issues on testing contributing to the testing communities through blogs, articles, and conference speaking engagements.He is the author of several articles on test automation process, covering the testing workflow. Follow his tech activities on Twitter (@prashant_geek).
