Performance Testing in Cloud

Factors which needs to considered while defining performance strategy in Cloud

Elasticity:

Elasticity is the ability to scale up your system resources when needed, and scale down when not required. Here are two important measures of cloud elasticity: spin-up elasticity and spin-down elasticity.

Load testing always consider peak load scenarios while measuring the system performance where as in cloud we may also have to consider Peak, moderate and low level usage of transactions. Base lining the System performance under these various loads will help the administrator to take a decision while scaling up or scaling down the resources based on load.

Scalability

Scalability is the ability of an application to handle increased processing demand with increase of load.

Testing the scalability of an application is very important; if the application is not scalable then the elasticity of the cloud can actually cost thousands of dollars. When moving to the cloud, it becomes even important to test the applications and to tune them properly so they are optimized when it comes to hardware consumption

Bandwidth

Usually Cloud Providers are distributed across different geographical locations. Bandwidth testing using tools like Shunra Cloud will help to ensure bandwidth requirements between the endusers and the cloud provider

Some Cloud Platform providers provide the following usage information of your application this can also be used as a basis while defining performance strategy

• CPU

• Memory

• # of DML statements

• # webservice calls

• # Calculations

End to End Performance Test Approach - Part 1

The purpose of this post is to show end to end approach for implementing performance testing. This document covers different phases of performance testing and approach to follow for successful performance test

Requirement Gathering:


During the Requirement Analysis phase it is important to assess and understand the nature of the application and the environment in which testing and monitoring should be performed. In addition to this, identify the resource requirements and plan based on the application. Also the existing Non-functional Requirement (NFR) would be discussed and understood by having discussion with the Design & Development team with respect to SLA’s, number of concurrent users and volumetric information. Also, wherever there is any specific information lacking, the same should be discussed with Design & Development team to reach a mutual agreement and definition of the same.

Performance team should also analyze system volume metrics over specified period of time in production to identify load patterns, work load behavior, Peak user load etc in the system.


Identify the peak period during volume metric analysis and also transaction arrival rate along with the user concurrency to simulate in the test environment. Create a workload model for the peak load with transaction mix along the user load based on the volume metric analysis. This will also help us in identifying the types of tests required for testing the application. Below is a sample template of the workload model for deriving the peak load.

Workload Model