Cloud Performance Testing of Your Software. How to avoid pitfalls with a new project?

It seems there is no such thing as a normal business day nowadays. The demands are high, companies do their best to meet all the requirements of the modern world and their customers and, besides, tech advances are continuous. To go with the tides, a business should keep up with them.

Unfortunately, lots of businesses often fail to service their corporate software and face service outages, dissatisfactions of customers as well as financial losses. To avoid the failures of corporate software and applications, serving your business functional testing is not enough. To avoid pitfalls performance testing is essential.

We are going to speak about it further and the main aspect to consider is the effectiveness of the cloud-based service and the advantages they offer. In short, cloud-based services are able to diagnose the performance problems set in and help to detect the nature and location of the potential problems. It is a good method to find out the demands to the server infrastructure, providing end-to-end transparency, in combination with a performance monitor on-site.

Cloud-based software performance testing

What is cloud based performance testing?

The checking performed to the software with the help of the cloud infrastructure is called cloud testing. You do not need to install locally any hard- or software, the cloud facilitates the simple creation of the testing environment. So, time and cost are saved due to simulating users from all over the world.

How does cloud performance testing work?

To run a test in the cloud you should first of all design the test case and the environment for this. You should choose and adjust the required testing tools, set the bandwidth, fine-tune hardware and software. The other parameters to carefully look upon are security, quality, reliability, etc. 

As soon as the setup is finished, the cloud server parameters should be finalized. Further on the cloudload should be generated and other factors simulated according to the strategy and the requirements of the tests performed. As a rule, the servers generate web traffic from all over the world and that ensures complete and proper testing of the software. 

In fact, everything is quite simple you must only provide a simple script to the tool in the cloud and set the necessary parameters, the cloud then will take care of everything. After (or sometimes during) the test, you should accurately monitor and analyze the results.

Benefits of cloud testing

It’s no brainer that cloud operations have manifold benefits and the main of them are the following: 

Testing scalability support

No ideal conditions, but real-life checking of all important features is performed. Cloud-based procedures allow testing in production environs. Besides, the nodes can either be segmented or bundled into groups, for instance, according to the device and OS type. You can alter the variables, and save certain parameters’ sets if you want to repeat the testing later. More than that, such kind of testing supports scalability because it can be performed with a variable number of users who come directly from the Internet to keep to the realistic conditions.

Geographical testing backing

You can perform testing from any locale, where your product is going to be used. The platforms in the cloud can imitate user load from different regions around the globe and the testers can get an overview of how the software will perform in the situation when numerous devices from various localities access it all together. So worldwide testing is possible for the products intended for global usage.

Reduced overall cost

With a cloud as a platform, you do not need to install, setup and support the hardware and software for the purpose. Besides, you do not need to hire support specialists for the testing lab. Usually, the payments are realized on the pay-as-you-use or pay-as-you-go principles, so the cost is sensitively reduced.

Load testing vs performance testing

While the benefits of cloud testing are more or less obvious, let’s proceed to the test types you should run and the difference between the load tests and the others.

Performance testing

It’s checking the system behavior along with the examination of reliability, responsiveness,  speed, stability, scalability, and software and infrastructure resource utilizing. The types of such tests may be different depending on the data you want to verify and the business goals you set. 

Performance testing allows you to analyze various KPIs: number of users, hits per second, response time, errors in a certain period of time and correlations between all these parameters. So you can spot the bottlenecks, errors, and bugs of your project and figure out the way to improve product performance.

Load testing

It allows checking how the system operates under a great number of virtual users making simultaneous actions in a definite time period. This testing helps to determine how a product handles heavy loads and the number of users it is able to serve at a time. Different system parts and sections can be trialed: for instance, you can check the maximum load handled by a checkout page of your app or site. Besides, it’s possible to determine how the load builds and behaves.

Conclusion

Any software and app require performance testing, it ensures its smooth and flawless operation. Cloud technologies have simplified the process to a great extent, however, some concerns should be kept in mind. Any result is subject to the provider’s network condition and resources used. 

To make sure your testing was run in a proper way, turn to the professional service providers and analysts, who are able to tell proper results from the miscarried procedure.  Axisbits is ready to give you a helping hand in this aspect or advise how to do it most proficiently.