Insight into "CLOUD COMPUTING"

At the most fundamental level, the cloud is a highly organized set of computing systems. It is composed of familiar resources in the world of computing—such as servers, networks, and storage.

If you’re testing a cloud-based application on a set of blade servers or a database server with storage behind it, you encounter the same familiar technologies you would find in on-site testing—such as microprocessors, memory, and networking.

In this sense, the cloud operates on the same premise as everyday computing. Servers connect to networks and networks connect to storage systems. The result is a platform that runs software applications. It just so happens that those applications are either running a virtual machine or are running web services on a platform that is running on a virtual machine. The
platform could be running a website or it could be running a collection of applications on top of virtual machines. Viewed from this level, the cloud doesn’t change much—until you consider that these things are accessed via the Internet.

But the cloud has other interesting aspects for developers and performance testers. The access to the Internet—the bytes that go in and the bytes that come out—is billed on demand and has some instant-on capabilities. When consuming a cloud-based service or cloud-based application, we have unique operational models—such as billing on demand, deploying a virtual machine on demand, and creating a web service on demand.

If your code is ready to go, you can now have an application up and running in minutes and be billing customer transactions almost instantly.

With its on-demand and instant-on capabilities, the cloud offers inherent scalability. That’s implied by the very architecture of the cloud.

With its use of virtualization and web services, the cloud is both elastic and expansive. It will automatically expand itself to meet the demand. This characteristic has far reaching implications for performance testing.

Let’s take a closer look at the characteristics of the cloud that bring a new set of concerns for performance testing….to be continued in my next post. (Source:- www.hp.com)