Performancing Metrics

Performance blog: June 2010

Monday, June 7, 2010

Performance Testing in Cloud

Factors which needs to considered while defining performance strategy in Cloud

Elasticity:

Elasticity is the ability to scale up your system resources when needed, and scale down when not required. Here are two important measures of cloud elasticity: spin-up elasticity and spin-down elasticity.

Load testing always consider peak load scenarios while measuring the system performance where as in cloud we may also have to consider Peak, moderate and low level usage of transactions. Base lining the System performance under these various loads will help the administrator to take a decision while scaling up or scaling down the resources based on load.

Scalability

Scalability is the ability of an application to handle increased processing demand with increase of load.

Testing the scalability of an application is very important; if the application is not scalable then the elasticity of the cloud can actually cost thousands of dollars. When moving to the cloud, it becomes even important to test the applications and to tune them properly so they are optimized when it comes to hardware consumption

Bandwidth

Usually Cloud Providers are distributed across different geographical locations. Bandwidth testing using tools like Shunra Cloud will help to ensure bandwidth requirements between the endusers and the cloud provider

Some Cloud Platform providers provide the following usage information of your application this can also be used as a basis while defining performance strategy

• CPU

• Memory

• # of DML statements

• # webservice calls

• # Calculations