In a society that is ever increasing its use of technology and showing no signs of slowing down, it is becoming more and more pertinent to ensure the best quality products. Companies are being pushed to reach a wider audience by accelerating innovation and constantly improve its customers´choice within their platform. Striving to advance the development process while perfecting the overall quality and security of software is top priority.

Cloud testing has emerged over the years as a proposed asset to the software development lifecycle and a larger amount of companies are choosing to adopt this method. In it´s simplicity, cloud testing is the use of cloud environments in order to simulate real-world traffic in order to test cloud computing services. It focuses on core components such as application, network and infrastructure.

Cloud Testing methodology challenges

Of Course, cloud testing, like any new model brings about its own unique set of challenges and overcoming them is no easy task.

• Availability is a common issue among organizations who have adopted to migrate to the cloud. An organization needs to be able to ensure timely delivery of the product and have the infrastructure in place to provide guaranteed uptime, scalability as well as ensuring top quality software.

• Also, the lack of standards for universal solutions into how internal resources can be integrated with public cloud resources can lead to many interoperability problems.

• Running business applications on the cloud as opposed to a local environment can bring about major security concerns. Data is being often being entrusted to third party suppliers and organizations must find a way to guarantee its secureness. While the cloud environment offers many robust disaster recovery plans and backup solutions, conducting security tests can be difficult, as the degree of test scenarios that can be carried out are somewhat limited.

• Testing all the diverse components of the cloud such as networks, servers, databases and software performances can make it challenging to identify problems especially when considering different geographies. Organizations now must find a way to use these various components to determine where exactly the problems exist.

Advantages of Cloud Testing

So why adapt cloud testing?

• Cloud testing can provide teams with the flexibility to access the necessary tools and testing infrastructure from anywhere and at any time. Teams can adopt tools to suit their needs.

• Agile workflows are also a key component of cloud testing such as continuous integration. This allows for constant testing of new code and deployments can be carried out more rapidly and efficiently. Teams can stay more on schedule and are ready to deliver features, patches and other functionality whenever needed.

• No hardware is required, this makes development and testing more flexible and allows for immediate access and updates for any application.

• Using cloud platforms, instances of various operating systems can be created on demand allowing for compatibility issues to be tested effortlessly.

• Overall costs can be reduced, the elasticity of the cloud platform ensures tools can be easily scaled to the needs of a team and is often a pay-per-use basis. This alleviates the needs to implement more computing power that is typically underutilized gaining a cost advantage for the company.

Cloud computing is here to stay and adopting the use of cloud testing principles within your organization can help test applications in the cloud more rapidly, efficiently, ensuring better quality solutions, while at the same time, reducing costs. Here in Teldat, we have adopted these cloud testing principles across our multiple cloud solutions in order to provide our customers with the best possible product.