Clever Cloud Computing

I’m still somewhat sceptical about many of the claims made for cloud computing as I’ve written before. However, I have recently come across some genuinely innovative and useful implementations of what could be called cloud technology. My favourite so far is Web Performance’s Load Tester 4. As the name suggests, this a product you can use to load test your web application. It’s been around for many years and is one of the easier load test packages to use.

One of the problems with all load testing software is that your testing infrastructure needs to be sufficiently powerful to simulate the load. If you are trying to simulate 1000 users from a single machine, it’s likely that system will itself become stressed and will fail to deliver an accurate simulation. The solution is to have multiple engines to share the load simulation which many packages already have. The next issue is bandwidth, as if you run your load engines in your office to test your production web application that is in a data centre, it is likely that your local internet connection will saturate and again the simulation is inaccurate. Hence you need to also locate your load engines in a data centre. Such a setup will work but there is a large cost and time overhead as you need dedicated hardware and data centre space.

Web Performance’s solution to this problem is to make available preconfigured load engines in Amazon’s EC2 cloud architecture. When you wish to carry out a test, you connect up to an EC2 load engine and run your load from the cloud. You can connect up to multiple engines if required, and although I’ve not tested it, you can select load engines at different locations, which could be useful for assessing user experience from different parts of the world. You pay for each engine by the hour.

I had a little trouble getting my first engine to work but this was probably due to me not reading the instructions properly.