Cloud testing is a form of software testing in which web applications use cloud computing environments to simulate real-world user traffic.
Overview Cloud testing uses cloud infrastructure for software testing. Organisations pursuing Testing in general and load, performance testing and production service monitoring, in particular, are challenged by several problems like limited test budget, meeting deadlines, high costs per test, a large number of test cases, and little or no reuse of tests and geographical distribution of users add to the challenges.
Ensuring high-quality service delivery and avoiding outages requires Testing in one's data centre, outside the data centre, or both. Cloud Testing is the solution to all these problems.
Effective unlimited storage and quick availability of the infrastructure with scalability, flexibility and availability of distributed testing environment reduce the execution time of Testing large applications and lead to cost-effective solutions.
The need for traditional approaches to testing software incurs a high cost to simulate user activity from different geographic locations. Testing firewalls and load balancers involve the expenditure on hardware, software and maintenance. In the case of applications where the rate of increase in the number of users is unpredictable or there is variation in the deployment environment depending on client requirements, cloud testing is more effective.
Types of Testing
A stress Test is used to determine the ability of the application to maintain a certain level of effectiveness beyond the breaking point. It is essential for any application to work even under excessive stress and maintain stability. Stress testing assures this by creating peak loads using simulators. But the cost of creating such scenarios is enormous. Instead of investing capital in building on-premises testing environments, cloud testing offers an affordable and scalable alternative.
Load testing of an application involves the creation of heavy user traffic and measuring its response. There is also a need to tune the performance of any application to meet certain standards. However, a number of tools are available for that purpose.
Performance Finding out thresholds, bottlenecks & limitations is a part of performance testing. For this, testing performance under a particular workload is necessary. By using cloud testing, it is easy to create a such environment and vary the nature of traffic on-demand. This effectively reduces cost and time by simulating thousands of geographically targeted users.
Functional Testing of both internet and non-internet applications can be performed using cloud testing. The process of verification against specifications or system requirements is carried out in the cloud instead of on-site software testing.
Compatibility Using a cloud environment, instances of different Operating Systems can be created on demand, making compatibility testing effortless.
Browser performance To verify the application's support for various browser types and performance in each type can be accomplished with ease. Various tools enable automated website testing from the cloud.
Latency Cloud testing is utilised to measure the latency between the action and the corresponding response for any application after deploying it on the cloud.
Issues and challenges
The initial setup cost for migrating Testing to the cloud is very high as it involves modifying some of the test cases to suit the cloud environment. This makes the decision to migrate crucially. Therefore, cloud testing is not necessarily the best solution to all testing problems.
Legacy systems & services need to be modified in order to be tested on the cloud. The usage of robust interfaces with these legacy systems may solve this problem. Also, like any other cloud service, cloud testing is vulnerable to security issues.
The test results may not be accurate due to the varying performance of service providers' networks and the internet. In many cases, service virtualisation can be applied to simulate the specific performance and behaviours required for accurate and thorough Testing.
Steps for cloud testing
· Develop user scenarios
· Design test cases
· Select the cloud service provider
· Setup infrastructure
· Leverage cloud servers
· Start Testing
· Monitor test goals
· Deliver results
Keys to successful cloud testing
Understanding a platform provider's elasticity model/dynamic configuration method
Staying abreast of the provider's evolving monitoring services and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Potentially engaging the service provider as an ongoing operations partner if producing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software
Being willing to be used as a case study by the cloud service provider. The latter may lead to cost reductions.
Effective ways for cloud testing
Online-based application tests on an Online cloud application supervisors/vendors perform these tests in order to check the functions and performance of their cloud-based services. This is usually done with the help of Functional Testing, and online applications are connected to a legacy system. These tests can determine the quality of the connection between the application and the legacy system is validated.
Cloud-based application tests on a cloud These types of tests help determine the quality of cloud-based applications with respect to different types of clouds.
Cloud-oriented or SaaS Testing These tests are typically performed by SaaS or Cloud vendors. The primary objective of these tests is to assess the quality of individual service functions that are offered in SaaS or cloud programs. The tests that are performed in this environment provide validation for the system, unit, security, function, and integration functions. The most effective method of doing this is with the help of regression testing, scalability evaluation, and performance testing.
Major benefits of testing cloud systems include
Dynamic testing environments Traditionally, organisations invest in software/hardware infrastructures for Testing. This usually does not match the requirements of rapidly changing environments making it very challenging for organisations to keep up. Therefore, cloud testing is an effective solution because it can easily replicate the target customer's environment and find defects in the early stages of the cycle.
Easily customisable Using a cloud system to test applications is advantageous for organisations because they can use it to emulate customer-centric environments. Cloud testing teams can easily use a large variety of permutations and combinations as test scenarios, such as different configurations, browsers, operating systems, etc. As a result, they can make customisations to save cost and time.
Scalability This is probably one of the most attractive traits of cloud testing systems because computing resources could be increased or decreased wherever it may seem necessary. This feature is widely used by organisations that have rapidly changing business environments.
Low-cost A challenge of rapidly changing business environments is seen when organisations have to invest in in-house infrastructure even when their servers aren't going to be in use all the time. If this is the case, companies will have to bear unnecessary overheads like license renewal. Therefore, the transition to cloud testing can save huge costs for the organisation.
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