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Cloud-Based Load Testing - Best Practices and Benefits

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri
Cigniti Technologies

Modern businesses rely on web or mobile applications to achieve a host of business objectives, including market differentiation and delivering a personalized customer experience. However, such applications can be subjected to high traffic on certain days, which, if not taken into account, can lead to unpredictable outcomes and customer dissatisfaction. These may include slow loading speeds, downtime, and unpredictable outcomes, among others. For instance, many business applications run the risk of facing customers' wrath on specific business days, such as Black Friday, when traffic is high. Hence, such applications must be tested for load thresholds to improve performance. Businesses that ignore load performance testing and fail to continually scale these applications leave themselves open to service outages, customer dissatisfaction, and monetary losses.

At the same time, the cost of setting up the infrastructure for application performance testing can be a challenge for business enterprises, especially small and medium ones. This is because businesses need to arrange computing hardware, configure the hardware and software with precise settings, and manage the whole environment. These tasks require significant time and resources. Considering all these factors, SMEs need cost-effective solutions for efficient load testing. There is a one-stop solution for performance load testing for every load threshold — Cloud.


Benefits of Cloud-Based Load Testing

Cloud-based performance testing comes with a host of benefits:

: Cloud-based load testing helps businesses scale their load testing thresholds based on their needs. It provides access to unlimited computing resources, making it possible to simulate large-scale traffic without the need for expensive physical infrastructure.

2. Agility: It enables businesses to quickly adapt to changing business requirements and respond to any unexpected surge in traffic. Besides, with the ability to quickly scale, businesses can ensure their applications are ready to handle any traffic that comes their way.

3. Flexibility: It allows businesses to conduct load testing from anywhere in the world, using a variety of devices, operating systems, and other paraphernalia. This makes it easier to simulate real-world traffic scenarios and ensure the application performs optimally in an omnichannel environment.

4. Collaboration: Cloud-based load testing allows multiple team members to work on the same project simultaneously from different locations. It helps generate accurate and consistent outcomes and improves application performance.

5. Cost-effectiveness: With the help of performance load testing services, businesses can avoid the high costs associated with setting up and maintaining on-premises load testing infrastructure. With cloud-based load testing, they need to pay for the resources they use, making it more affordable.

Best Practices for Conducting Load Performance Testing in the Cloud

Conducting proper load testing can help businesses reduce costs and save the team from scrambling during a major event. Here, we present some of the best practices for cloud-based performance testing.

1. Evaluate the Load-Testing Tools & Models

Some of the applications available in the market work across all cloud platforms. However, choosing the right load testing tools that are compatible with the application structure is crucial. So, it is important to check for key features such as upload or download speeds, bandwidth simulation, and so on. These will help to properly understand the load limits.

2. Leverage Automation & Scheduling

Businesses should select effective load-testing tools containing essential features, such as reports, scheduling, analytics, and so on. This saves the DevOps team from overworking the production systems during testing as well as scheduling the ongoing load tests. Once these tests are done, these tools can generate accurate reports to show how the application is performing.

3. Test Inside and Outside the Firewall

If there are several reasons behind poor application performance, finding the main reason can be a difficult exercise. However, the right performance testing strategy can help conduct testing inside/outside the firewall to identify and fix errors.

4. Simulate Real-world Scenarios

Exposing the application to extreme loads until it fails cannot be allowed in a real-world scenario. This is because in the real world, the application needs to run on different browsers, devices, operating systems, and networks. Further, the test environment should provide a wide range of scenarios, keeping the load at a basic level with different configurations.

5. Check the Bugs

To enhance the value of cloud-based load performance testing, businesses should check for bugs or vulnerabilities by leveraging performance testing services. Once they have all the data and insights, the necessary actions can be taken to achieve ROI.

Conclusion

Cloud-based load performance testing offers numerous benefits for businesses looking to ensure the quality performance and scalability of their applications. Its ability to simulate a high volume of users and traffic from various locations irrespective of the time of day, helps provide valuable insights into an application's behavior under stress. It is cost-effective, eliminates the need for expensive on-premises hardware, and reduces the time needed to set up and run tests. With proper implementation and management, cloud-based web services performance testing can help businesses deliver reliable and high-performing applications to their users.

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri is Manager, Marketing, at Cigniti Technologies

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Cloud-Based Load Testing - Best Practices and Benefits

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri
Cigniti Technologies

Modern businesses rely on web or mobile applications to achieve a host of business objectives, including market differentiation and delivering a personalized customer experience. However, such applications can be subjected to high traffic on certain days, which, if not taken into account, can lead to unpredictable outcomes and customer dissatisfaction. These may include slow loading speeds, downtime, and unpredictable outcomes, among others. For instance, many business applications run the risk of facing customers' wrath on specific business days, such as Black Friday, when traffic is high. Hence, such applications must be tested for load thresholds to improve performance. Businesses that ignore load performance testing and fail to continually scale these applications leave themselves open to service outages, customer dissatisfaction, and monetary losses.

At the same time, the cost of setting up the infrastructure for application performance testing can be a challenge for business enterprises, especially small and medium ones. This is because businesses need to arrange computing hardware, configure the hardware and software with precise settings, and manage the whole environment. These tasks require significant time and resources. Considering all these factors, SMEs need cost-effective solutions for efficient load testing. There is a one-stop solution for performance load testing for every load threshold — Cloud.


Benefits of Cloud-Based Load Testing

Cloud-based performance testing comes with a host of benefits:

: Cloud-based load testing helps businesses scale their load testing thresholds based on their needs. It provides access to unlimited computing resources, making it possible to simulate large-scale traffic without the need for expensive physical infrastructure.

2. Agility: It enables businesses to quickly adapt to changing business requirements and respond to any unexpected surge in traffic. Besides, with the ability to quickly scale, businesses can ensure their applications are ready to handle any traffic that comes their way.

3. Flexibility: It allows businesses to conduct load testing from anywhere in the world, using a variety of devices, operating systems, and other paraphernalia. This makes it easier to simulate real-world traffic scenarios and ensure the application performs optimally in an omnichannel environment.

4. Collaboration: Cloud-based load testing allows multiple team members to work on the same project simultaneously from different locations. It helps generate accurate and consistent outcomes and improves application performance.

5. Cost-effectiveness: With the help of performance load testing services, businesses can avoid the high costs associated with setting up and maintaining on-premises load testing infrastructure. With cloud-based load testing, they need to pay for the resources they use, making it more affordable.

Best Practices for Conducting Load Performance Testing in the Cloud

Conducting proper load testing can help businesses reduce costs and save the team from scrambling during a major event. Here, we present some of the best practices for cloud-based performance testing.

1. Evaluate the Load-Testing Tools & Models

Some of the applications available in the market work across all cloud platforms. However, choosing the right load testing tools that are compatible with the application structure is crucial. So, it is important to check for key features such as upload or download speeds, bandwidth simulation, and so on. These will help to properly understand the load limits.

2. Leverage Automation & Scheduling

Businesses should select effective load-testing tools containing essential features, such as reports, scheduling, analytics, and so on. This saves the DevOps team from overworking the production systems during testing as well as scheduling the ongoing load tests. Once these tests are done, these tools can generate accurate reports to show how the application is performing.

3. Test Inside and Outside the Firewall

If there are several reasons behind poor application performance, finding the main reason can be a difficult exercise. However, the right performance testing strategy can help conduct testing inside/outside the firewall to identify and fix errors.

4. Simulate Real-world Scenarios

Exposing the application to extreme loads until it fails cannot be allowed in a real-world scenario. This is because in the real world, the application needs to run on different browsers, devices, operating systems, and networks. Further, the test environment should provide a wide range of scenarios, keeping the load at a basic level with different configurations.

5. Check the Bugs

To enhance the value of cloud-based load performance testing, businesses should check for bugs or vulnerabilities by leveraging performance testing services. Once they have all the data and insights, the necessary actions can be taken to achieve ROI.

Conclusion

Cloud-based load performance testing offers numerous benefits for businesses looking to ensure the quality performance and scalability of their applications. Its ability to simulate a high volume of users and traffic from various locations irrespective of the time of day, helps provide valuable insights into an application's behavior under stress. It is cost-effective, eliminates the need for expensive on-premises hardware, and reduces the time needed to set up and run tests. With proper implementation and management, cloud-based web services performance testing can help businesses deliver reliable and high-performing applications to their users.

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri is Manager, Marketing, at Cigniti Technologies

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...