Leverage the Cloud Infrastructure to change the way you test your Apps
LoadStorm seeks to change the way we test our web applications. The name says a lot but does not give the full detail. It is a lot more than just a load test and best of all, it is cheap. Leveraging Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Services, LoadStorm offers an easy way to provide a heavy load on your business apps and you only pay for each test. No expensive licensing required. In fact, if you only want to test with a single user, it is completely free.
LoadStorm has run load tests with 10,000 plus users navigating through your application as you see fit. Before each test is run, the LoadStorm software estimates the number of servers that will be required to run the test and those servers are extantiated on demand allowing lower cost to LoadStorm which is passed on to the customer.
I asked Scott Price, Vice President Sales and Marketing at LoadStorm, why his price point was chosen and he told me about the paradigm shift they are trying to create in the Application Development Life Cycle. Scott Price discussed the habit of developers to wait to the end of the development phase to perform a load test. LoadTesting at all phases of the project could allow developers to find the bottle necks faster and with greater ease.
LoadStorm offers some education on the different types of load testing on their site. One of which is called Regression Testing. LoadStorm defines it as the following:
“A testing practice that confirms software that was working in the previous release is still working in the current release.”
This would be a growing test of the application to test each feature created and test for all bugs found to ensure they are not reintroduced to the application. This would make troubleshooting and fault finding a lot easier because each time a piece of code is modified, you can ensure that the change did not break any other part of the application. Regression testing would only require a single user and would therefore be free using LoadStorm.
Another test discussed was endurance testing. This test does not increase load to the breaking point but instead places the expected load on the application for a long period of time. This allows for the testing of memory leaks caused by missed cleanup or ever growing Arrays in the code.
The benefits of this service however extend beyond just development. I can’t help but consider the operational benefits. If users are experiencing issues a test could be implemented to find what type of errors the end user is seeing. The test could grow with each feature of the application or with each new version. It may even be possible to have an email alerting feature when errors are detected in the future.
A drawback that I forseewould be the lack of infrastructure testing. Although testing with thousands of users is possible, the number of source IP addresses is limited which does not test the server and DNS load balancer. Scott Price did mention that part of the LoadStorm road map would be to allow for that type of testing. Along with allowing you to be granular in choosing a number of users groups in different regions to see how the application performs with increased latency and packet loss.
I challenge you to give LoadStorm a try. I am very curious to see how it has helped you and the many different ways you have leveraged the LoadStorm capabilities. There will be some video tutorials uploaded to their site soon.
