Sys-con.com have released a great article on Cloud Load Testing.   The article, first of a multi part approach gives users a view of how to choose the right approach.

Titled “Benefits of Loading Test in the Cloud (Part 1)” the Article is written by Steve Weisfeldt

Many companies have moved applications to the cloud as a way to reduce capital expenditure while improving IT focus and effectiveness. End users see the cloud as a way to access their documents and applications remotely from anywhere and from any device. IT managers see the cloud as a means of rapidly adapting their infrastructures as needed via virtualization and a pay-per use-model. But what about load testing engineers? Can they seize the opportunities afforded by the cloud to better test the performance of web applications?

As with past overhyped trends in IT, it is important to see past all the talk and look for concrete ways to take advantage of this new technology’s flexibility and scalability to save time, reduce costs, and improve the way your organization works.

This article describes how the cloud is revolutionizing load testing and the advantages it provides in many situations for ensuring your web applications perform well in production. It also covers key capabilities to look for in a load testing solution. Without the right tools in place, simply moving your testing activities to the cloud will likely not deliver the results necessary to justify the move. Understanding how to apply the right tools and practices to make the most of the cloud is fundamental to cloud-based testing and vital to ultimately going live with total peace of mind.

To read the full article please read http://www.sys-con.com/node/2118613

SOASTA, the leader in cloud-based performance testing, today announced that it has added two new editions to its line of CloudTest solutions: CloudTest Enterprise Edition and CloudTest Standard Edition. For organizations with multiple testing teams, divisions, or customers, CloudTest Enterprise offers a fully integrated edition for performance testing multiple applications across global enterprises and delivers access to the SOASTA CloudTest Platform, the world’s largest global test platform. CloudTest Standard addresses the market need for more agile and affordable performance testing from within the firewall. CloudTest Enterprise and CloudTest Standard join SOASTA’s existing CloudTest Professional (Pro) and CloudTest On-Demand solutions, empowering a wide range of organizations and testing teams to ensure the high performance and reliability of their business-critical Web and mobile applications.

“The performance and reliability of Web and mobile applications can be absolutely crucial to a business’ bottom line, and this is true for organizations of any size – from small Internet businesses to large global brands,” said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO. “With the addition of CloudTest Enterprise and CloudTest Standard, we are adding ‘bookends’ to our current offerings — a comprehensive performance testing solution for enterprises, as well as a more agile solution for internal-only performance testing teams. Regardless of the edition used, all CloudTest customers get the scalable testing with real-time resolution that SOASTA is known for.”

CloudTest editions deliver access to the SOASTA CloudTest Platform, the world’s largest platform for testing the performance of consumer-facing Web and mobile applications at scale. With CloudTest, customers have the flexibility to launch internal and external tests on a single platform that seamlessly integrates internal hardware with private and public cloud infrastructure and test community resources. CloudTest’s patented visual test creation, automated test server provisioning, and real-time resolution allow testing teams to execute performance tests with unparalleled speed and agility, whether testing in the lab or from the cloud.

CloudTest Enterprise Edition delivers the full power of the SOASTA CloudTest Platform to organizations with testing needs that cross projects, lines of business, customers or geographies and require segregated, secure project data and access. Built for globally distributed testing and unlimited scale, it enables seamlessly integrated internal and external testing. With CloudTest Enterprise, testing teams can build, execute and analyze performance tests of virtually any scale on a single test platform that integrates data center infrastructure and private clouds with external clouds such as Amazon EC2, IBM, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace.

CloudTest Standard Edition is a new edition designed for testing teams executing internal performance tests. Delivered at less cost and complexity than traditional tools, the CloudTest Standard solution offers fast, affordable, and scalable performance testing using an organization’s data center resources. CloudTest Standard supports performance testing of any modern Web, Web service, or mobile application in a lab, staging or production environment. With CloudTest Standard, customers can benefit from SOASTA’s next-generation testing technology, including its visual test creation tools and real-time analytics engine that allows testers to drill into live data to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and potential areas of stress as the test is executing.

CloudTest Enterprise and CloudTest Standard extend SOASTA’s existing CloudTest offerings, which include:

CloudTest Professional (Pro) Edition offers a performance testing team full control to build, execute and analyze performance tests quickly and affordably. Like CloudTest Enterprise, CloudTest Pro provides the flexibility to launch internal and external performance tests on a single platform and delivers access to the SOASTA CloudTest Platform. Installed in the data center or on the cloud, and accessed by users via any common Web browser, CloudTest Pro eliminates constraints to continuous, full-coverage, internal and external Web performance and load testing.

CloudTest On-Demand offers a rapidly delivered, turnkey service leveraging the full power of the SOASTA CloudTest Platform. Ideal for organizations with no or highly constrained testing teams or projects with tight timeframes, customers work closely with SOASTA’s performance testing experts to build and execute their tests, and there is no need to buy software, provision hardware or train valuable resources

Sauce Labs, the web application testing company, today introduced Selenium 2 support as part of its flagship cloud application testing service. Selenium 2 is the result of collaboration in the Selenium community to integrate the WebDriver project with the Selenium project. With over 4 million downloads in just 4 years, the Selenium project is one of the world’s most popular software testing frameworks for web applications.

“The focus of Selenium 2 has been our users. When your Selenium tests pass, you can be confident that your applications will work for your users,” said Simon Stewart, original creator of WebDriver and Senior Software Engineer in Test at Google. “I’m extremely pleased to see Sauce Labs carry this attention to the user from the open source project to their Sauce OnDemand service. Also, it’s extremely cool to have a video of each and every test that is run!”

Advances in Selenium 2 allow Selenium to work more tightly with browsers, offering high fidelity emulation of interactions such as clicking and typing so companies can ensure the performance of their web applications across the diverse base of browsers in use today. Key advances include:

• Support for iPhone and Android testing – Selenium 2 includes built-in Android and iPhone emulators to allow developers and QA teams to expand their use of Selenium to support the growing demand for mobile applications. Mobile application testing will be available on Sauce OnDemand in Q1 2011, but users of the service can take advantage of all other new features in Selenium 2 today.
• New API - The Selenium 2 API is more developer friendly and is also conceptually simpler because it directs users to focus on only two basic objects: WebDriver (browsers) and WebElements (anything on a web page) to construct tests. Selenium provides API libraries for most modern programming languages. In Selenium 2, every API library has been tailored to each programming language for easier usability.
• Improved architecture – Selenium 2 now features more advanced automation bindings for each browser to provide the best, most stable way to test applications. The low-level approach that Selenium 2 uses to control browsers is a more solid base for the project to add features for currently supported browsers, and provides a better framework for supporting more browsers in the future.
• Enhanced scalability – The new Selenium 2 architecture allows developers and QA teams to “scale up and down.” When a developer or QA wants to test locally on a single machine, Selenium 2 is more streamlined and “scales down” — no longer requiring the use of a background server process to control the browser from their test scripts. Therefore, simple test scenarios only call for a simplified test infrastructure. However, when teams want to run tests across multiple machines with multiple browser configurations, Selenium still retains the power necessary to handle upward scaling needs.

“Selenium sparked a revolution when it was released in 2004. We didn’t have the options for testing Ajax applications that we have today, and it was all too common to have a QA team test by hand. Selenium 2 has fomented another revolution in testing web applications, making it feasible to test this kind of application without the overhead and workarounds that the first evolution of Selenium necessitated,” said Julian Simpson, Principal Consultant at The Build Doctor. “Sauce Labs is another kind of revolution, making it easy for anybody to enjoy Selenium 2’s ease of testing with freedom from the tyranny of deploying an array of browsers and operating systems. Using Sauce OnDemand is worth it to avoid Internet Explorer 6 alone.”

“At Sauce Labs, we’re proud to provide a Selenium 2 offering that delivers one of the most robust testing experiences for web and mobile applications available today,” said Jason Huggins, original creator of the Selenium project and co-founder of Sauce Labs. “Selenium 2 is a significant advancement for application testing because it moves beyond some of the previous challenges in Selenium 1’s architecture and provides a stable base for enhancing the entire tool chain. We’re confident Selenium 2 will prove to be very compelling for developers and QA teams alike.”

The rise in prominence of Cloud Based Technologies has resulted in the need for Cloud Software Testing Tools.

Cloud Tools is a set of tools for deploying, managing and testing Java EE applications on Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

Cloud Tools contains 3 main components

* Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are configured to run Tomcat and work with EC2Deploy. See list of installed software.
* EC2Deploy – the core framework. This framework manages EC2 instances, configures MySQL, Tomcat, Terracotta and Apache and deploys the application.
* Maven and Grails plugins that use EC2Deploy to deploy an application to EC2

The team behind Cloud Tools are looking for beta testers to get involved in testing a new hosted version of Cloud Tools that provides automated application monitoring and management.

For more details you can go to Chris Richardson’s website at  www.chrisrichardson.net