2. Cloud testing typically involves monitoring
and reporting on real-world user traffic conditions as well as load balance and
stress testing for a range of simulated usage conditions.
Cloud testing services from companies can conduct a complete analysis of a company’s cloud
computing strategy and provide the results to the company in the form of
interactive real-time dashboards that detail conditions under both existing and
simulated peak usage.
The cloud has mainly three types of
delivery models or components that provide “as a Service”
capabilities:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This is the most fundamental layer which forms the
building block of the cloud. It mainly comprises of physical resources
such as Storage, Network devices, compute servers, etc. All these
computing resources are available on demand, where a user pays as per his
usage.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): The central layer in the cloud Is the platform. Here
there is no control over the underlying infrastructure but you can access
the deployed applications. Hence this provides the entire run time
environment on demand which could be a development or test environment.
Hence in this model, most commonly you would have a VM that contains the
complete environment like OS, required middle ware, etc. available when you
need it.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): The topmost layer here is the application layer,
which is generally visible to any user. Here, applications / products are
available to the user on demand via the internet. Hence instead of having
to acquire licenses for a particular user, this proves to be the most cost
effective way of making sure that the license is always in use. Examples
of this are Gmail, Google docs, Photo shop, etc.
Types of cloud
There are 3 types of cloud formations: public, private and
hybrid clouds:
- Public clouds are where services are available to everyone, where the resources are allocated and provisioned
dynamically as per request.
- Private clouds are generally managed within firewall rules of a
particular organisation and
are available only to the users within the company.
- Hybrid clouds are a mixture of private and public clouds. Organisations can decide what services they want to expose
to everyone and what services they want to expose to only the users within
the organisation.
Cloud testing refers
to testing of resources such as hardware, software, etc. that are available on
demand. Even the testing
here can be viewed “as a service”. For cloud offerings it’s essential to make
sure that the service (product) not only meets its functional requirements but
also nonfunctional requirements. With the range of applications in the cloud it
is now becoming essential to develop cloud testing strategy.
Conclusion
Cloud computing has today become one of those “big bangs” in the
industry. Most organisations are now leaning to adopting the cloud because of
its flexibility,
scalability and reduced costs.
Using the cloud for testing is immensely helping organisations
to acquire the required tools, software licenses, infrastructures at a very low
cost without having to set it up themselves and then worry about its maximum
utilization.
