ITS TIME FOR CLOUD TESTING !!!!!

• Cloud testing is a form of software testing in which web applications use cloud computing environments to simulate real-world user traffic. Cloud Testing uses cloud infrastructure for software testing.

What is cloud computing?

In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive.

When you store data on–or run programs from the hard drive, that’s called local storage and computing.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet). Clouds can be classified as public, private or hybrid.

• Organizations pursuing testing in general and load, performance testing and production service monitoring in particular are challenged by several problems like limited test budget, meeting deadlines, high costs per test, large number of test cases, and little or no reuse of tests and geographical distribution of users add to the challenges.

• Leading players, such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com offer their cloud infrastructure for services.
• Some of the major requirement of Cloud testing
  • Sufficient test models and criteria
  • Proper test methods and solutions

Importance of Cloud Testing

• Reduce  costs  by  leveraging  with  computing resources  in  clouds
• Advantage  of  on-demand  test  services (by  a  third-party)  to  conduct  large-scale  and effective real-time online validation for internet-based software in clouds.
• Easily leverage scalable cloud system infrastructure to test and evaluate system performance and scalability.

Benefits of Cloud testing

• Testing is a periodic activity and requires new environments to be set up for each project, it reduces its capital and licensing expenses as much as using virtualized resources.
• Reduce operating and labor costs by automating development and testing resource provisioning and configuration
• Shorten its development and testing setup time from weeks to minutes.
• Improve product quality and reduce the detected defects

Different Forms of Cloud-Based Software Testing

Basically there are four different forms of cloud-based software testing.

• Testing a SaaS in a cloud – It assures the quality of a SaaS in a cloud based on its functional and non-functional service requirements.

“SaaS – Software as a service is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted”

• Testing  of  a  cloud  –  It  validates  the  quality of  a  cloud  from  an  external  view  based  on  the provided cloud specified capabilities and service features. Cloud and SaaS vendors as well as end users are interested in carrying on this type of testing.
• Testing inside a cloud – It checks the quality of a cloud from an internal view based on the internal infrastructures of a cloud and specified cloud capabilities.  Only cloud vendors can  perform this type of testing since they have access es to internal infrastructures and connections between its  internal  SaaS(s)  and  automatic capabilities.  Only cloud vendors can perform this type of testing since they have accesses to internal infrastructures and connections between its  internal  SaaS(s)  and  automatic  capabilities, security, management and monitor.
• Testing over clouds – It tests cloud-based service applications  over  clouds,  including  private, public,  and  hybrid  clouds  based  on  system-level  application  service  requirements  and specifications. This usually is performed by the cloud-based application system providers.

Cloud Test Environments:

There are three types of cloud test environments:

• A  cloud-based  enterprise  test  environment,  in which  application  vendors  deploy  web-based applications in a cloud to validate their quality in a cloud infrastructure.
• A private/public cloud test environment, in which vendors deploy SaaS applications. SaaS in a private (or public) cloud to validate their quality.
• A  hybrid  cloud  test  environment,  in  which vendors  deploy  cloud-based  applications  on  a hybrid cloud infrastructure to check their quality.