Are you building a new web site that's expected to receive high volumes of traffic? Do you own a large test rig for your web site that sits in your computer room or data centre burning fuel? Are you trying to scale down your IT infrastructure footprint where you can? If you or your clients answer yes to any of these questions then cloud testing services may be a good option.
Old concept, new name
Running tests in the cloud isn't a new concept; we've been able to use specialist companies that run web tests from their shared infrastructure for some time. What has changed is the understanding of what the cloud is beyond the technical community. Because senior management see the benefits of cloud pricing like the $ per hour model, they're more inclined to favour it.
Large scale load tests for less
If you've been involved in delivering a new web site, you may have had a conversation with your client or business head around the importance of load testing before go live. If you have, you've probably described the different test options but because of commercial or time pressures it can (mistakenly) be discounted as worthwhile. There is also the classic, 'I was told it will handle x concurrent users' conversation. When these estimations are given they can only be based on certain parameters such as the average page size, number of transactions, and a guesstimate of how many unique visits and page views are made. Now that we have a common understanding of the cloud's commercial benefits we can add this into the mix of options and run large scale web tests from multiple simulated users, IP ranges and regions on a PAYT (pay as you test) model.
Two key players
UK Based (not branded as cloud testing, but their add hoc model is the same)
US Based