and bandwidth that maximizes value. Since you only pay for what you use, it is in your best interest to choose an appropriate type for your needs rather than a larger, more costly size that will be underutilized. Performance across family tiers is different, and testing within each tier will have drastically different load testing results.
As previously mentioned, there are also several instance types that provide varying levels of computing power. The types are available across each family, so you need to be certain that your load testing environment is leveraging the same family and instance combination that your production environment will use.
Of course, one benefit of a cloud-computing environment is that it is easy to change the configuration of the environment on demand. You can use this to your advantage by running your load tests across different instance families and types. This is a convenient, low-cost way of determining the optimal combination on which to host your production environment. In fact, your recommendation could end up saving your company a significant amount of money over time as the costs of combinations can differ drastically. Your test results can be used to optimize both performance and cost, making both your users and your management happy and further supporting the value and importance of your performance testing efforts.
I have only briefly touched upon a number of important infrastructure and architecture elements that can affect your ability to accurately measure the performance of your application in a public cloud. Depending on the unique architectural elements of your vendor, there will likely be other considerations that will affect your approach to performance and load testing. Be sure to review all of the vendor’s technical documentation and ask whether the vendor provides any documentation to help you develop a robust performance and load testing strategy. Some vendors may even offer access to solution engineers who can help you identify other critical infrastructure components to consider with your testing. Remember that the cloud vendor works for you and your company, so do not be afraid to demand as much information as is necessary for you to develop your load testing strategy. If things go wrong from a performance perspective in the public cloud with your application, ultimately the blame will be on your shoulders, so do your due diligence.
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About the author
Scott Robert Aziz is director of software quality services for QA labs at UST Global. He has worked in various roles within software quality assurance for twenty-four years, and he has ten years of experience working with and advising companies that have adopted SOA and web services. From an SOA testing perspective, his expertise is in the formulation of a holistic SOA QA strategy that optimizes quality across an entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), not just the testing phase. Scott also has extensive experience with defining the proper SOA testing tools needed throughout the SDLC to optimize testing efficiency within an SOA implementation. Scott can be reached at Scott.Aziz@ust-global.com.
