Cloud Computing for Performance testers Part2...

Accessibility: -
Accessibility refers to the ability to access the interfaces and the system under test instantly. The minute you fire up a virtual machine, it’s available. You can access that virtual machine from anywhere, and you can access it via application programming interfaces (APIs). But it’s remotely running, so you don’t have physical access to the machine that supports it.

For the developer or performance testers, cloud accessibility is a two-way street. It brings new ways for systems to automatically connect themselves, but it takes away your ability to physically access the underlying systems. You can no longer touch the machine. Accessibility is now in a different mode.
The system is hosted on the Internet. It’s governed by a remote set of administrators that you don’t havecontrol over. There is a whole new way of accessing the system, and this changes how you test it.

Efficiency:-
When it comes to measuring the efficiency of systems, things are very different in the cloud. When systems are located on your premises, you have a direct view into power and cooling issues, temperature deltas, and the characteristics of new system architectures. In the cloud, everything is hosted remotely. Each cloud vendor has a different architecture and a different approach to optimizing the efficiency of your particular solution. So if you’re testing for efficiency, lots of things
are going to change from one cloud vendor to the next.


Global delivery:-
The cloud is ubiquitous. Inherently, it is everywhere, instantly. When you put an application in the cloud, you can get to it from virtually anywhere that you can access the Internet. This global characteristic of the cloud raises special testing concerns. Your performance criteria for enduser response time is key, of course, but you also have to think about other issues—currency calculations, metrics, and all the different functions that make an application available globally in different languages in different cultures, in different currency systems, and in different units of measure.

Immediacy:-
Immediacy has the biggest impact to quality assurance (QA). Immediacy enables elasticity, or the ability to expand or contract almost instantly. But beyond that dynamic, we are talking about the immediacy at which the application under test (AUT)
becomes available. That means it can be developed faster, and it can be turned on and turned off like a light switch.

The speed at which we can deploy an application into a test environment creates unprecedented challenges for performance testing. Deployment time is just shy of instantaneous. You used to have perhaps three to four months to build the system under test, build the test bed, do the test planning, and indentify the test requirements. Now you might have just minutes
to complete the same tasks. The ease and speed at which you can create the system under test means there is now less time for testing.