Cloud Computing for Performance testers - Part1

Before we get into the importance of Cloud Computing in Performance testing area, we will through a pen on the charactersitics of Could Computing.....
Elasticity:-
When it comes to performance testing in the cloud, the characteristic of greatest concern is elasticity, or scalability.

From a test perspective, this is the familiar scale-up and scale-out story. There is no real difference here in terms of how the cloud is elastic, but there can be significant differences in the ability of the architecture to adapt to changing conditions.

When it comes to testing scale-up and scale-out capabilities, the cloud architecture might be clustered in a manner to automatically add more resources, such as CPU and memory capacity. It could add more nodes to the cluster. And it could automatically adapt to the load you put on the system. That is the elastic responsiveness of the cloud, which can be configured for an application. Then there is the flip side of cloud elasticity—the ability of the architecture to contract. In the cloud, you can actually have a system that scales down automatically when fewer resources are needed. This means you have to incorporate a test run that not only scales up when you need more capacity but scales down when you reduce the load on the system.

For example, you might shed memory and drop a few nodes from a cluster to reduce the cost of operating a service in the cloud.