

Why Cloud Based Load Testing Is A Killer App - keltecp11
http://johngannonblog.com/2009/03/04/why-cloud-based-load-testing-is-a-killer-app/

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dmv
"Virtual Stress-free Testing in the Cloud"
[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/02/virtual-stressfree-
testin...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/02/virtual-stressfree-testing-in-
the-cloud.html)

Has links to several load testing products using EC2.

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ncarlson
Did he link to Apple's Keynote software as a "load testing managed service
provider"?

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wmf
He must have confused Keynote with Keynote. <http://www.keynote.com/>

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jgannon
Thanks for the catch - I use Zemanta to speed up the linking and tagging of
posts and I didn't check to make sure that the proper Keynote was linked :) In
any case, it should be fixed now.

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moe
What a nonsense article.

Makes it sound as if the script-playback was the difficult or expensive part
of a load-test. In reality that is the _trivial_ part.

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mustpax
That's not how I read it, I think this actually makes a lot of sense.

In a regular (non-cloud) deployment, there are unavoidable differences between
the staging and real production configurations. No one can afford to double
their hardware costs for the sake of uber-realistic load testing results. So
people usually opt to create a closely matched staging environment where
testing is performed. Every once in a while something slips by that's only
reproducible on production, and you're stuck debugging a critical and hard to
reproduce bug. Not the best combination.

With cloud computing, you're supposed to have lots of redundant computing
capacity. So it's trivial to test in an environment that's identical to
production by just asking for more processing power for the purposes of
testing. As an added bonus you also have the distributed resources to generate
considerable parallel load, which also helps.

That last part like you said is not that hard. But that's only the icing. The
cake is being able to test on a 1-1 replica of production. That's precious.

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moe
Hmm indeed, from that angle it makes more sense. I guess I skimmed it a bit
too lightly. But I'm still not overly impressed by the article as this is
really just stating the obvious - basically a rehash of the standard cloud-
propaganda that has been raining down on us for years.

Nonetheless I take back my "nonsense" statement. That was too quick a
judgement...

