Cloud Computing: What could this mean for testers?

A problem for test managers, especially those involved in performance testing is that there are not the platforms available on which to run the number of test systems that they would like to, such as a UAT system for each build, or a system for performance testing. Those involved in performance testing will often have to pitch a very good case in order to get a like for like staging environment for performance testing. Many test departments are denied this and performance testing is done out of hours or after UAT is complete in the stages before go live.

Sure, most IT departments now have some kind of virtualisation, however even to get a virtualised server often internal procurement is involved, as there are storage, resource utilisation and other capacity questions to be answered. In the cloud a server can be provisioned within typically less than 5 minutes and cost just cents to run. The cloud seems like a very good option as a test platform.

Companies such as Microsoft and Oracle have given organisations the option to use their premises, kit and infrastructure as testing platforms when very large performance tests have been a necessity, now with the cloud this is no longer essential as there is a more cost effective, straight forward option available.

Of course the cloud is a shared resource and is a different proposition to a purely hosted environment; there are issues such as performance due to the fact that cloud machines are essentially virtual machines running in data centres on shared physical machines (only with a nice web interface or API to facilitate management of these virtual machines). However these issues can be overcome. For example to performance test a cloud based system, it may be necessary to run several tests at different times of the day to ensure that an even set of results is achieved. We saw this when running the cloud based test shown in our video here: www.youtube.com/user/Quotium. The second time we ran the test we found that results were different to the first time we ran the test.

The cloud provides great resilience due to its distributed nature, vastly reduced costs and simplicity. Assuming that issues surrounding the cloud are not a problem for an organisation, testers within that organisation could in fact lead their own organisation into a cloud computing environment – could this coin a new term – Test Driven Infrastructure? If a cloud infrastructure is used as a test environment then it would follow suit that the business would then start to look at the cloud as an alternative to their hosted or in house solutions and the testers would have shown the way.

As a company we have found that the cloud answers many of our needs including the ability to have a scalable load platforms and international presences that before would have been difficult and expensive for us to reach.

If you'd like to try cloud computing for yourself just google 'amazon ec2', get your credit card ready (it'll only cost you a few cents or possibly dollars - just remember to terminate the instance when your finnished otherwise the dollars might add up) and start an EC2 instance. You then simply use a terminal services client to connect to it and use it as you would any other VM.