Cloud computing services or cloud infrastructure management have been gaining popularity and are considered one of the most disruptive forces in the IT industry. Today, enterprises are adopting cloud solutions as it helps them save money and effort that would otherwise be spent in maintaining and upgrading their on-premise infrastructure. Undoubtedly, cloud computing solutions are in more demand as they offer various advantages to businesses.

Content 1. What is cloud computing? 2. Major research analyst predictions on the cloud computing market 3. Types of cloud computing services 4. Some use cases of cloud computing 5. Major benefits for businesses with cloud computing 6. What is cloud testing? 7. Why should businesses leverage cloud testing? 8. Common testing challenges faced in cloud computing 9. How to overcome the challenges of testing in cloud computing? 10. An overview of various types of cloud testing 11. Conclusion

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery/access of computing resources such as applications, servers, data storage, networks, etc., over the internet. It works on the pay-as-you-go model and delivers hosted services on the internet. Today’s businesses are rapidly adopting cloud computing, and its dominance in the market is growing significantly.

Major research analyst predictions on the cloud computing market

According to Fortune Business Insights, the global cloud computing market is projected to grow from $250.04 billion in 2021 to $791.48 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 17.9% during the forecast period 2021-2028.

According to Statista, the worldwide public cloud computing market is growing and is expected to reach an estimated 482 billion USD in 2022. This encompasses business processes, platforms, infrastructure, software, management, security, and advertising services delivered by public cloud services.

Types of cloud computing services

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):

It allows users to rent physical, logical (network), and storage infrastructure from cloud vendors and deploys virtual machines on the cloud.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS):

It provides customers with a complete platform that includes hardware, software, and infrastructure required for developing, running, and managing applications.

3. Software as a Service (SaaS):

It provides ready-to-use software to clients over the internet. Instead of deploying, patching, and updating numerous apps on various devices, clients can quickly access SaaS applications over the internet.

4. Serverless Computing:

It is a cloud-based service where a cloud provider manages the servers and provides backend services on an as-used basis. It allows users to write and deploy code without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

Some Use Cases of cloud computing

1. Video streaming platforms:

Some on-demand video streaming apps include Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime that leverage cloud computing and work on an on-demand streaming model.

2. File hosting services:

Most of the storage services that are designed to store data and create backup services are based on cloud computing models.

3. Chatbots/Voice assistants:

All major natural language intelligent chatbots/voice assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc., leverages cloud computing capabilities to provide human-like responses to customer queries. Cloud computing enables storing information related to user responses and preferences to provide a personalized experience.

4. Communication/collaboration apps:

Apps like calendars, Skype, emails, WhatsApp are all based on cloud models. All the messages and information are stored in the cloud to be accessed anywhere and anytime.

5. Backup and recovery tools:

All backup and recovery tools like Dropbox and Google Drive enable users to store data on the cloud rather than on-premise data storage centers. It ensures secure data storage, more storage space, and better data recovery options.

6. Social media apps:

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media apps utilize the power of cloud computing. The information shared by the user on these apps is stored in the cloud so that it can be accessed by the user anytime/anywhere and delivers a great user experience.

Major benefits for businesses with cloud computing

1. Offers flexibility:

Cloud computing provides great flexibility to users, as the data stored on the cloud is accessible from anywhere at any time.

2. Allows scalability:

Scaling the cloud computing services is very easy. If the user wants to buy extra storage space, the cloud provider can easily provide extra space by upgrading the package within a few minutes.

3. Improves collaboration:

Cloud computing services allow employees located at different places to collaborate easily. Employees can collaborate easily and work efficiently by simultaneously syncing, working, sharing the documents, and much more.

4. Provides security:

Storing data on the cloud is much safer than storing it on physical devices. As any breach of security in business premises can lead to loss of data, breaching the security of the cloud is not as easy as an on-premise breach due to the added layers of security.

5. Reduces risk of data loss:

Cloud computing services also reduce data loss chances. Cloud providers ensure data backup and recovery services that help users save their data without worrying about the potential risk of hackers, viruses, ransomware attacks, etc.

6. Ensures cost-savings:

Establishing and running the data center on-premise is expensive. Cloud computing cuts down the high cost of maintaining and updating hardware on-premise. Also, the pay-as-you-go model or the subscription-based model of cloud solutions saves businesses a lot of expenses and helps them also have access to automatic updates.

Cloud computing offers many benefits to businesses as data and services can be accessed anytime and from anywhere. But, businesses must leverage cloud testing to ensure their apps, infrastructure, and systems function seamlessly.

What is cloud testing?

Cloud testing, also known as cloud-based testing, includes testing an application in the cloud for performance, security, scalability, interoperability, multitenancy, etc. Typically, leveraging cloud computing infrastructure reduces the unit cost of computing and specifically increases testing efficiency. Cloud testing also provides compelling benefits of flexibility, scalability, testing complex test environments involving multiple mobile OS, browsers, various platforms, and much more.

Why should businesses leverage cloud testing?

1. Improves security:

Cloud-based security testing is an effective way to improve the application’s security in the cloud. It ensures the identification of security loopholes and helps remove security vulnerabilities that cyber-attackers could otherwise exploit.

2. Enhances performance:

Performance testing in cloud computing ensures that there are no performance bottlenecks in the software and the auto-scaling features work properly so that servers or virtual machines can automatically manage the load handling capacity when traffic utilization levels fluctuate.

3. Checks compliance:

During cloud testing, testers also ensure that the application under test meets all the laws and regulatory compliance, such as data protection laws, data sovereignty laws, data localization laws, access to information laws, etc., necessary for an app to operate in the cloud.

4. Enables seamless app migration:

Cloud testing ensures effective migration of applications on the cloud by removing data migration issues related to incompleteness of migrated data, database errors, and other technical glitches.

5. Ensures proper integration:

Cloud testing removes the integration issues and ensures that the application is compatible with various platforms, properly integrates with servers, and works well in the cloud.

6. Allows testing across various types of clouds:

Cloud testing can be done across various types of clouds, such as public, private, hybrid, community, or their combinations.

Typically, the cloud computing environment also poses many challenges, and usually, these challenges tend to multiply with challenges of testing apps on the cloud. This cloud testing process involves testing apps across modules, and environments to identify various issues. Typically, businesses should understand and overcome these challenges to ensure their business-critical apps perform seamlessly and securely on the cloud.

Common testing challenges faced in cloud computing

1. The complexity of creating a test environment:

One of the major challenges testers faces while testing in the cloud is creating a test environment containing all necessary app configurations and test data. Creating a test environment and managing the test environment is time-consuming and poses a significant challenge.

2. Challenge with testing diverse components:

Another challenge that testers face in cloud computing is testing diverse components that require the preparation of various test cases. The tester needs to identify the problem and prioritize the test cases, which consumes a lot of time and delays the delivery.

3. Security and privacy concerns:

Though cloud providers offer great security, data backup, and data recovery options, the risk of security breaches still exists. While conducting security testing manually, the testers can miss out on some security bugs; therefore, the chances of human-prone errors act as a great challenge for testers.

4. Compliance issues:

Compliance with legal regulations and standards is another challenge that cloud testers have to look at while testing in the cloud. Non-compliance of apps with these standards can lead to high penalties and sometimes even monetary and reputation loss.

5. Integration testing issues:

While performing the integration testing in the cloud, the test is performed on various components, such as network, database, systems, devices, servers, etc. Since testers have no control over the environment in the cloud testing, the chances of a database crash, any other breakdown, or server downtime might occur.

6. Performance issues:

If the network bandwidth offered by cloud services is low, it hampers the testing and delivery of apps in the cloud.

How to overcome the challenges of testing in cloud computing?

1. The challenge of creating a test environment can be overcome by leveraging cloud-based test environment management tools and frameworks, such as Testim.io., Plutora, etc.

2. The challenge of testing diverse components in the cloud can be overcome by leveraging automated cloud testing tools, such as Xamarin Test Cloud, Blaze Meter, LoadStorm, etc.

3. Testers should leverage automated cloud-based security testing tools such as Nessus, Acunetix, Metasploit, Nmap, etc., to overcome the challenge of security testing in the cloud.

4. Testers can overcome the challenge of compliance by creating a unique and comprehensive cloud test strategy to ensure compliance with standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, etc.

5. Testers should leverage cloud-based integration testing tools, such as Rational Integration Tester, Protractor, SOASTA CloudTest, etc., to overcome the challenge of integration testing.

6. The challenge of app performance in the cloud can be overcome by leveraging cloud-based performance testing tools that work well under varying bandwidths. Some cloud-based performance testing tools are LoadView, LoadStorms, OctoPerf, Blazemeter, etc.

An overview of various types of cloud testing

1. Functional Testing:

The main aim of this testing type is to ensure the application on the cloud functions seamlessly, meets all business needs and customer expectations. The various types of functional tests are:

End-to-end business flow testing: This testing method tests the application’s workflow from start to end. It involves real user scenarios to ensure the application works well and delivers a great CX.

Exploratory testing: In this software testing type, the application on the cloud is tested on the fly. The main aim of this testing type is to find bugs in the software quickly.

Data migration testing: As the name itself suggests, this testing type is performed to ensure proper data migration on the cloud. It ensures no data loss happens while data is migrated from various sources to the cloud.

Automation testing: This testing type involves automating end-to-end testing of the software. The main aim of this test is to speed up the software testing process, reduce regression testing time and find bugs more effectively.

Compatibility testing: This cloud testing type ensures the application is compatible with different platforms and works well when moved from one cloud infrastructure to another.

3. Non-functional Testing:

This cloud testing type validates the non-functional aspects of the software. The main aim of this test is to ensure high-performance, security, and reliability of the application on the cloud. Major non-functional testing types are:

Performance Testing: This test is performed to ensure the application effectively handles the high-user load and performs well under all conditions when moved to the cloud. It also involves load testing, scalability testing, availability testing, and volume testing.

Security Testing: This cloud testing type ensures end-to-end security of applications on the cloud. Applications, networks, and compliance are tested thoroughly in this testing type.

4. Cloud-specific testing:

This testing type is specially performed on the application in the cloud. It includes various testing methods:

Disaster Recovery testing: This test checks the disaster recovery time taken by the application and ensures the application becomes available to users again in minimum time with minimum or no data loss on the cloud.

Compatibility testing: This testing type is performed to ensure that the application in the cloud is compatible with various platforms, servers, networks in the cloud environment.

Multi-tenancy Testing: Multi-tenancy is an architecture where multiple tenants/users share the same physical resources of a single platform. This testing type is performed to ensure the software handles the high user load due to multiple tenants and ensures that tenants share proper resources with the underlying security.

Conclusion

Cloud solutions have gained significant importance in recent times and have become the need of the hour for enterprises. Businesses should ensure end-to-end testing of their apps in the cloud to reap the maximum benefits of cloud computing. However, some testing challenges in the cloud environment should be carefully handled and addressed. Businesses should leverage cloud testing from next-gen QA and independent software testing services providers for fully functional, high-performing, secure, and scalable cloud apps.

The post How to Overcome Challenges of Testing in Cloud Computing? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Businesses continue to invest heavily in the IT infrastructure and additionally the licenses are required for both software and hardware which essentially involves cost and time. As businesses revolve around ways to reduce their costs and ease their operations, it is at this particular point, the concept of cloud migration comes into place. Cloud migration is the process of moving databases, applications, and IT processes of businesses into the cloud.

Content1. An overview of cloud migration statistics by leading research analysts 2.  Major Benefits of Cloud Migration for Businesses 3. Top considerations businesses must know before adopting Cloud Migration 4.  9 Important steps for Cloud Migration 5.  How can TestingXperts help with Cloud Migration?

This cloud migration or cloud computing effectuates the move from on-premise or legacy infrastructure to the cloud. This legacy infrastructure includes servers, networking equipment, apps, databases, and other software or hardware infrastructure which can be moved to the cloud through the process of cloud migration.

There are many benefits businesses get with cloud migrations such as agility, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, improved CX, etc. With many leading cloud service providers, businesses can get services on-demand and can pay only for the resources they use. Thus, more and more businesses are moving towards the cloud. There are interesting facts and some statistics stated by leading research analysts on cloud migration.

An overview of cloud migration statistics by leading research analysts

● Forrester predicts that the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% to $120 billion in 2021. Alibaba cloud will take the Third revenue spot globally, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

● According to Forbes, 32% of IT budgets will be dedicated to the cloud by 2021.

● A recent survey conducted by Flexera on 750 enterprises and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), in the first quarter of 2020 revealed that the vast majority of respondents (93 percent) have already employed a multi-cloud strategy.

● According to Enterprise Cloud Solutions, half of the U.S State and Federal governments heavily use the cloud. On a similar note, another FedRAMP Survey Results Report states that the governments in the United States, especially in bigger cities, are increasing their cloud adoption especially following the initial COVID-19 outbreak.

● As per the news published by The Hindu, Tech giant Microsoft has witnessed an over 775% increase in demand for cloud services post-pandemic. The COVID-19 outbreak across the world led companies to shift from on-premise IT infrastructures to the cloud

All these above data signifies how important it is for businesses to look upon cloud migrations. It is also predicted that multi-cloud will dominate post-pandemic and COVID-19 has been a major driving force for the accelerated demand of hybrid and multi-cloud models for businesses. Moreover, with the huge number of benefits of the cloud, businesses are moving towards cloud adoptions rapidly.

Major Benefits of Cloud Migration for Businesses

1. Improves scalability

Cloud computing helps in scaling up the business by supporting large workloads. Unlike on-premise infrastructure, it does not require any physical setup of assets like servers, networking equipment, software licenses, etc.

2. Delivers greater agility

3. Ensures more flexibility

4. Reduces cost

5. Improves operational performance

6. Reduces CAPEX

7. Enhances security and compliance

8. Brings in less maintenance

9. Facilitates built-in status monitoring

Top considerations businesses must know before adopting Cloud Migration

Migrating to the cloud is an important aspect for businesses, and even before migrating to the cloud, businesses across domains and industries should try to understand the below points:

● Take a stance on the cloud infrastructure stack flexibility before opting for cloud migration

● Identify cross-application dependencies before planning the migration waves and plan to migrate all dependent systems together

● Identify logical sequencing of migration waves. For example, if accessing some internal applications which require a VPN system to be set up, your VPN server needs to be migrated before the internal applications

● Have an understanding of the probable workloads that can be moved and which cannot be moved to the cloud

● Analyze or get an understanding of the security and safety of authentication and authorization that will be given by the cloud provider

● Get a clear understanding of the customer access to your services and the extent of availability from the cloud provider during migration along with disaster recovery processes

● Get an understanding of databases as they are usually encrypted, hence consider encryption and decryption aspects while moving to the cloud

● Get an understanding of the security and compliance challenges that might crop up during the migration

● Take up a cost estimate for cloud migration and analyze the ROI to decide upon cloud migration

After analyzing the above points, then businesses can move their data, apps, databases, etc. to the cloud by following an effective cloud migration process.

9 Important steps for Cloud Migration

1. Perform an organizational assessment :

2. Assess current infrastructure readiness and requirements:

Assess the current state of your business infrastructure. Determine whether your business is ready to be moved to the cloud. Shifting to cloud solutions might require reconfiguring the entire business to fit as per the technology. Therefore, first assess the current requirements and readiness of your business infrastructure to safely move to the cloud.

3. Choose between cloud deployment models:

Select the right platform wherein you need to decide whether you want to migrate your IT infrastructure to the private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud. Public cloud is scalable, cost-effective due to pay per usage model. Private cloud is good for businesses that require the highest level of data security. Hybrid cloud allows the movement of workloads between private and public clouds through orchestration. Multi-cloud allows businesses to reap the benefits of each cloud platform. Hence, based on the benefit with each of these, you can decide between single cloud, multi-cloud, etc.

4. Determine the service model of cloud computing:

There are three main service models of cloud computing – Infrastructure as Services (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Services (PaaS). All these three service models have varied features for storage and resource pooling, and thus, as a business, you have to decide which one you should adopt based on the business need.

5. Define cloud KPIs:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that help to measure the performance of your application and services against your expectations. Some of these cloud migration KPIs are; User experience –page load time, response time; infrastructure – CPU usage %, disk performance, memory; Application performance – error rates, throughput, Availability, etc. As a business, you should have the KPIs made available and analyze them for your cloud migration.

6. Define the cloud roadmap:

Before heading towards the cloud migration and actual execution process, it is essential to first prepare a detailed cloud migration roadmap. The roadmap should outline the data migration process step-by-step and how long it is expected to complete the cloud migration process.

7. Choose the right apps to move to the cloud:

Decide whether you want to migrate all apps at once or to opt for service-by-service. Not all apps are cloud-friendly, while some apps work well on the private cloud, and some apps work well on the public cloud. Therefore, you need to carefully choose the right apps that should be moved to the cloud.

8. Migrate your data:

Now comes the most important step i.e. migration of apps and data. It is easier to migrate slowly and in small manageable steps. This sort of effective migration helps you to understand what is working and what needs to be changed during the cloud migration process.

9. Test thoroughly and then move to production:

Once your cloud environment is all set, data is populated, and when apps are moved to the cloud, it is time to conduct an end-to-end cloud testing of apps and data. The more complicated your architecture is, the more caution is required and more thorough end-to-end cloud testing is needed to ensure successful cloud migration.

How can TestingXperts help with Cloud Migration?

Cloud-based platforms have helped enterprises to reduce time-to-market and eliminate upfront costs. Due to this cloud-based solutions are in high demand. But some issues related to data security, privacy, integration, and application performance pose a great challenge to successful application migration to the cloud. Businesses require cloud-based testing to ensure successful cloud implementation and to realize the complete benefits from cloud solutions.

TestingXperts (Tx) helps you define an effective strategy to test the cloud so that you can address all the challenges and pitfalls. Software testing in the cloud usually focuses on functional testing of the application, and it also needs a strong emphasis on non-functional and cloud-specific testing. Tx adopts this end-to-end approach to ensure high quality across all aspects of cloud implementation. We have experience in testing leading SaaS products and understand the associated complexities. We bring specific domain expertise in various industry verticals along with proven experience in other non-functional cloud testing services.

The post 9 Important Steps for Cloud Migration first appeared on TestingXperts.

Contents 1. Need for Cloud Migration 2. When to move your workloads and applications to the cloud? 3. Cloud Migration Tips to Follow 4. What are the best Cloud Migration tools? 4. Conclusion

Need for Cloud Migration

When to move your workloads and applications to the cloud?

Cloud Migration Tips to Follow

1. Analyze your App to Determine Cloud Type:

2. Plan Cloud Migrations Carefully (Hybrid/Public Cloud):

3. Evaluate in Detail Cloud Economics:

4. Perform Security, Compliance & Governance Assessments:

5. Pilot Test Cloud to Move in Phases:

6. Embrace Automation:

What are the best Cloud Migration tools?

VMware/CloudHealth Technologies:

Turbonomic:

Azure Migration Tools:

Cloud Endure:

Micro Focus PlateSpin Migration Factory:

AWS Migration Services:

Dynatrace:

Conclusion

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The key business drivers behind moving workloads to the cloud vary from one organization to another. It might be an intention to improve scalability and performance or simply to reduce the organization’s upfront investment by assigning their IT infrastructure responsibilities to one of the trusted service providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon (AWS), IBM, Google or Oracle. Forbes explains some of the many reasons or business drivers for organizations moving to the cloud in this article

Contents 1. QA Focus Areas for Successful Cloud Migration 2. Conventional Testing Vs Cloud Testing 3. Addressing Key Challenges That Arise While Validating Applications 4. Functional Validation 6. Integration Testing (With Third-Party Applications) 7. Security Testing 8. Performance Testing 9. How TestingXperts Can Help You

Once you have decided to move your products or services to the cloud, testing is a crucial step in the cloud migration journey. It avoids cloud scalability issues, server breakdown issues such as application/website crash, database errors and more, which can be extremely risky in terms of brand’s reputation, time and resources.

With that in mind, business owners or IT decision makers should properly plan and perform their cloud migration journey while putting cloud Testing in top priority during cloud migration irrespective of environment.

QA Focus Areas for Successful Cloud Migration

Cloud migration requires key focus on certain areas of Application (product/service) Testing, such as: Functional Validation, Integration Testing, Security Testing, Scalability and Performance Testing.

However, cloud hosting adds new dimensions to application validation when it is compared to conventional testing. The table below depicts QA focus areas of application testing migrated to cloud, compared to conventional testing:

Conventional Testing Vs Cloud Testing

Addressing Key Challenges That Arise While Validating Applications

Cloud migration throws certain challenges in validating applications. Some of the instances and how to validate them at various aspects are discussed here.

Functional Validation

Functional validation or cloud-ready validation assesses production readiness of migrated applications. It is fundamental to verify if various aspects of the migrated applications are performing as per SLAs. For an effective cloud migration, validate SaaS/Cloud services functions and perform end-to-end application’s function validation. Check the following test cases to perform functional validation of an application for cloud testing:

• Automated test suite is compatible with the application over the cloud
• Whether a valid input gives the expected results
• Service integration with other applications
• Page layout and object references are working as expected
• Cross-platform compatibility is ensured

Integration Testing (With Third-Party Applications)

Cloud migration is not just moving data, but it is managing a range of variables – security, authentication, integration, compatibility, testing and monitoring over time. Among the above variables, integration with third-party tools plays a significant role. Because, today, there are many technology choices with cloud integration than ever before. But, the dependencies between systems and applications can complicate integration testing. If you are integrating a lot of services together that come with varying SLAs, testing in the cloud with a plethora of third-party tools, services and applications, represents a major challenge. To avoid such issues, ensure you go through the below checklist and validate them effectively:

• What interfaces and systems need to be covered while planning for integration testing?
• What resources you need to do the validation and integration testing?
• Have a plan to develop and execute tests in coordination with third-party components
• Perform Integration Testing early
• Detect coordination problems in cloud environment – this is to ensure the applications are well configured with cloud environment

If you don’t have in-house expertise, make sure to outsource validation for integration to your cloud provider or a managed service provider who fills the gap.

Security Testing

One of the main deterrents to migrating to the cloud is Security. Applications can be very secure in the cloud, but unlike conventional storage, you will not have any hardware. This means, you don’t have complete control over the data. To keep the data secure in the cloud requires a whole new level of security procedures and strategies. If you are planning for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architecture, ensure you check whether your workloads can be migrated to the cloud; or will there be any significant difficulties after migration. Following checklist can be handy to crosscheck some cases:

• If you have legacy applications running on outdated platforms

• Proprietary software

• User validation – ensure the applications are accessible only by authorized users and are available only to them

• Protective measures against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks

• Validation of data security at rest, in use and during transit

• almost inevitably, the data is going to spread across multiple networks and devices after migration, with varying levels of risk and security. Before you can take an effective plan to avoid risk completely

here’s a checklist or questions you need to have answers:

• What type of sensitive data do you use, store or transfer?
• Who has access to this data?
• Why, when and where the users access this data?
• How is data stored when it is idle?
• How data access is controlled?
• What are the compliance requirements?

Various aspects of application Security Testing include: Data security and data privacy testing, application transaction security, business process security and user privacy security testing.

Performance Testing

Assessing performance and response time requirements of applications and workloads while migrating to the cloud is a significant factor determining cloud migration success.

There are areas that affect moving an application to a cloud service, some of them include response time implications and scalability factors. Check out the below steps to ensure workload performance and SLAs are met:

• Identify and document business transactions and application’s end-to-end flow
• Identify business SLAs for the business transactions
• Examine if your software comes with limited internet bandwidth or intensive CPU and input-output capacity requirements
• Address application’s architecture that is not appropriate with the cloud
• Identify monitoring requirements and setup tools
• Validate response times as per SLAs – perform Load Testing in parallel and validate whether applications or service performances under various loads are meeting the SLAs

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan

Be prepared for the worst-case scenarios in the cloud, from simple data recovery and disaster recovery practice to a plan addressing unique incidents of attack. Validate all your disaster recovery plans in the event of cloud outages.

• Test, measure and update business continuity processes periodically
• Perform tests to run simulations and evaluate team’s readiness
• Consider the test results to change or update your business continuity plan over time
• Validate application instances to restore automatically during hardware failures

How TestingXperts Can Help You

Moving to the cloud is a smarter way to get better and faster service at less price. And, this is only possible once all the boxes in the checklists mentioned in this article have been crossed and you follow the steps of each testing area correctly. Testing the objectives/validations and approaches that were mentioned in the above cloud assessment checklist could be quite tough. Our best bet is to work with a team that has done cloud migration testing before, many times.

TestingXperts helped hundreds of enterprises assess their cloud migration journey successfully by deploying validation checklists for each application to be migrated – avoiding problems and additional costs during IT migration.

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Introduction The next-generation infrastructure management technologies are transforming the way we manage IT infrastructure. The extensive implementation of virtualization and cloud infrastructure has shifted the bottleneck from allocating servers to configuring them. The arduous process where it used to take a couple weeks or months to assign a server, has been transformed into a process of a minute or two.

However, Infrastructure managers are often performing this provisioning of the infrastructure manually. The manual processes have certain disadvantages, such as:

Disadvantages of Performing Infrastructure Manually

• Higher cost • Lack of agility • Inconsistency due to human error • Difficulty in attaining and maintaining compliance

The older methods of infrastructure management, i.e., manual processes and documentation, single-purpose scripts, and graphical user interface based tools had their usage in the past. However, with the continuous need to scale infrastructure, adoption of temporary infrastructure, new ways of keeping things regimented are needed. To exterminate these disadvantages and to bring agility into the process, automation is required. Infrastructure as Code has surfaced as a best practice for automating the provisioning of infrastructure services.

What is Infrastructure as Code?

The arrival of tools such as Ansible, Puppet, SaltStack, and Chef, have enabled developers and sysadmins to maintain modular, automatable infrastructure, and delineate them using a domain-specific language. This advancement in technology has been named as Infrastructure as Code (IAC). As the name suggests, infrastructure as code is the practice of considering infrastructure as if it were code. This innovative concept helps in managing the operations environment in the similar way you do applications or other code for release. It brings about repeatable, consistent practices for provisioning and changing systems and its configuration.

Why Infrastructure as Code?

By using infrastructure as code, software deployment method can be made more agile for today’s fast-paced DevOps environment.

Benefits of Infrastructure as Code

Agility

With IaC, there is no need for the operations team to rely on cumbersome processes and practices to deploy software updates. IaC standardizes the process cutting down time, which is a significant factor in today’s DevOps environments.

Competency

With the IaC approach, there is no need for reinventing the wheel every time you set up a new version of the software. All the important instructions needed, are captured already in the code, making the process much more seamless and efficient.

Less Risk Involved

Extensive deployments in enterprises are designed carefully, as the risk tolerance for failure is very low. IaC, therefore, reduces the risk of human error.

So how can one use Infrastructure as Code for testing infrastructure? Stay tuned for more updates.

The post Infrastructure as Code: Accelerating Software Deployment first appeared on TestingXperts.

The velocity of mobile applications deployment is increasing each day. Organizations are striving to get those new applications/ features to market ahead of their competition. For this, testing the application quickly is crucial than ever. However, testers face numerous challenges such as unreliable testing infrastructure, distributed testing teams across cities and countries, agile development process necessitating continuous testing, and a plethora of testing devices in the market. Building all the required infrastructure and automated testing requires significant investment and effort.

Contents 1. Cloud-based infrastructure for software testing 2. Major benefits of leveraging cloud-based infrastructure for testing 3. Conclusion

Cloud-based infrastructure for software testing

A promising way to address this problem is to leverage cloud-based infrastructure for testing. Cloud-based service providers let you build testing< environments quickly and cost-effectively, along with providing all popular mobile devices on the cloud. You can also run automated testing in the cloud which enables testers to run parallel tests on various devices at the same time, cutting down testing time considerably and reducing the application’s release cycle. Whether you need to extend an existing application or build something new, cloud-based resources can help you save time and money both.

Major benefits of leveraging cloud-based infrastructure for testing

1. Continuous access to resources One of the major benefits of the cloud is the 24×7 availability of its resources. The cloud-based resources are available for testing by multiple teams around the clock, in contrast to potentially having shared access to current in-house infrastructure. The QA teams can have global access to testing infrastructure in different time zones or geographic regions, allowing for more test coverage in a 24-hour period.

2. Lower costs Infrastructure and tool licenses costs are ramping up quickly, especially for larger teams. However, cloud-based infrastructure allows the organization to manage its expenses well and provide better results at low costs. The cloud also provides a near-rapid way known as Infrastructure as Code(IaC), to build a test bed without the effort and cost involved to build out the infrastructure yourself.

3. Promotes agility and collaboration Cloud testing can boost agile standards by providing a platform that is inherently collaborative. Assets in the cloud are updated automatically, by which users can have the most recent information available immediately. Cloud-based tools facilitate better collaboration between local and distributed teams, promoting continuous integration and continuous testing.

Conclusion The evolution of cloud has made organizations realize the need for cloud as a platform or as an infrastructure. Cloud-based testing is offering several benefits to organizations as they move to agile processes. By integrating this approach while testing the mobile applications, teams can move more rapidly and achieve significant returns as a result. TestingXperts’ is a front-runner in enabling cloud testing services. Connect with us now and address all your QA challenges and pitfalls.

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Offering virtual pool of resources for storage and computing, cloud services have taken the industrial era to the era of information access. Cloud computing has completely changed the way applications are being developed, deployed, and used by the end users.

Contents 1. What is cloud Based Environment? 2. What is Cloud Performance Testing? 3. Types of Performance Tests on the Cloud 4. Conclusion

What is cloud Based Environment?

• Access to emails outside of office premises

• Updating mobile applications without any particular requirement

• Updating social statuses while traveling

• Accessing bank accounts while commuting

What is Cloud Performance Testing?

As cloud computing is on the rise, enterprise IT organizations have been adopting the cloud with a clear focus on infrastructure-as-a-service. The rise of mobile and website applications necessitate adoption of cloud. To make these applications effective and feasible, it is important to ensure their performance in all conditions of use. Performance being the utmost factor in testing a web application, it directly impacts end-user experience. Although performance testing in the cloud is quite different from the traditional approach, proper strategy and planning are involved while testing on the cloud.

The main aim of performance testing is to measure certain parameters such as latency, throughput with the variation in the number of parallel users accessing the application. With virtualization picking up, processes have to be made far more robust for cloud infrastructure. The real challenge comes when determining what should be moved to the cloud, and if so, whether public or private or would a hybrid be the correct choice. Would it provide value to the business? These questions make the transition to cloud all the more challenging.

Let’s understand what cloud is?

Cloud is a scalable pay-per-use model, where you can request for additional resources for a defined period. There is a high degree of location independence, for which virtual resources are assigned and reassigned dynamically according to the customer’s need. Storage, bandwidth, processing and a number of users accessing it at any point are some of the cloud metrics that are imperative for a successful cloud implementation. Elasticity being the major factor for cloud infra defines the ability of the cloud to deal with fluctuating load variations by adding resources and decreasing when required. Other factors that define a good cloud infrastructure are availability, scalability, and fault tolerance.

By moving load and performance application testing to the cloud, benefits such as lowering operational and capital costs can be realized. Testing in the cloud also lets you maximize your returns by utilizing cost-effective means of scalable testing applications. It helps in stimulating load tests that constitutes millions of concurrent users from various geographies.

Types of Performance Tests on the Cloud

• Load and performance tests

• Latency testing

• Capacity test

• Soak tests

• Failover tests

• Stress tests

• Browser performance testing

The major factor pushing cloud computing is cost-effectiveness. Cloud helps in creating separate test regions for system testing with utmost ease. The test strategy should align completely with the idea of moving to the cloud, including ease of infrastructure access, costs savings, a decrease in cycle times, and choosing the types of cloud such as public, private or hybrid. The strategy should also clearly mention types of other tests to be performed in the cloud such as soak tests, capacity tests, etc. Infrastructure requirements, building a test environment, required testing tools, software, hardware, and bandwidth be the other factors that should be an important part of your test strategy.

Execution of tests is the final step that needs to be done after the entire set-up is complete. For performance tests, it is necessary to vary the load with changing user’s demands and other factors so it can be tested according to a defined test strategy. It is important to make sure that all policies are clear with the Cloud services provider as usage is linked with the payment closely. Organizations are required to pay as they scale and as per the usage.

#Read our latest #blog to identify the #need for a #perfect #Performance #Testing #strategy in the #Cloud https://t.co/7FkwB0bdCT

— TestingXperts (@TestingXperts) January 23, 2017

Conclusion

TestingXperts’ performance testing teams have successfully conducted performance testing on the cloud for various clients. Our performance testing resource pool has expertise in open source (such as JMeter), proprietary, and commercial tools such as Load Runner, VSTS, etc. that helps us in offering you a tool agnostic methodology for performance testing. Get in touch with our advisors for all your performance testing queries at info@testingxperts.com